A new illustrated book on the work of multi-talented Gio Ponti has been published recently. It covers the Italian architect’s and designer’s complete oeuvre. Ponti’s core philosophy of modernism saw architecture as a representational object and a “self-luminous” stage for his humanistic art of living and boundless creativity. It is indeed no exaggeration to state that Ponti, who was born in 1891, shaped the appearance of modern Italy.

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For almost sixty years Gio Ponti, whose real name was Giovanni Ponti, designed the world with the greatest energy: Elegant skyscrapers, vases, tiles, armchairs, tables, chairs, villas, cutlery, ship interiors, wall mosaics, sculptures, drawings … One could continue this even further and yet not capture the oeuvre of Gio Ponti in its entirety: In his designs one can find all the styles of the 20th century, in some cases he even anticipated trends. He was a poet, designer, industrial architect, architect and interior designer all at the same time. Thus, his concept of art is to be understood very broadly since he always went beyond the respective categories and so created a complex creative universe with his designs, in which upon closer inspection one also recognizes a clear, unified vision.

Gio Ponti and his world of interiors, art objects, furniture, lighting fixtures, building plans, …

The German TASCHEN Verlag has now taken this as an opportunity to document the exceptional architect and his work in a massive book and the most comprehensive overview of his oeuvre to date. The book was produced in collaboration with the Gio Ponti Archive in Milan. As readers turn the pages, they are immersed in a world of interiors, art objects, furniture, lighting fixtures, building plans, hotel entrances, cruise ships, and much more. Even the book cover itself is a reference to a well-known floor covering by Ponti from one of his most famous designs, the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan.

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Italy at Ponti’s time: progressive, self-confident and future-oriented

The richly illustrated XXL book with about 136 projects shows Italy at Ponti’s time: progressive, self-confident and future-oriented. Like no other, Ponti, who was born in 1891, shaped the appearance of modern Italy. Berlin art director Karl Kolbitz has brought the works together in a detailed collection with illustrations of buildings, projects and plans, so that the book allows the viewer to float with ease through perhaps the most exciting times for design in the 20th century: Enthusiasm for technology and creativity come together with art and design history. It is also particularly noteworthy that each object appears in the original context in which Ponti originally created it. In this way previously unpublished materials and unposed photographs allow new dialogues between well-known masterpieces and the less famous, but no less lesser-known works, revealing new insights into his elusive life.

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Gio Ponti and his core philosophy of modernism

But who was Gio Ponti anyway, or rather, who or what was he not? In the booklet of the illustrated book one can find some answers to this question: In the essay by Gio Ponti’s grandson Salvatore Licitra, founder of the Gio Ponti Archive and curator of the exhibitions “Gio Ponti Archi-Designer” (Museè des Arts Decoratifs in Paris 2018) and “Gio Ponti” Loving Architecture” (MAXXI Rome 2019), as well while reading the interview with his daughter Lisa Licitra Ponti, who died in 2019 and through a detailed biographical text, written by Stefano Casciani, longtime editor-in-chief of DOMUS Magazine, readers will get a good insight into Gio Ponti’s work and person. He was a contemporary of the Bauhäusler, but unlike Walter Gropius for example, he was not a purist; the austerity of the latter’s architectural language was too boring and somewhat narrow-minded for him to see in it a new design. For him, both were important throughout his whole life: clear structure and decorative elements. He disliked the idea that only one of these should apply. His core philosophy of modernism therefore also saw architecture as a representational object and a “self-luminous” stage for his humanistic art of living and boundless creativity.

Ponti loved colors such as blue, tan, and yellow, and he had a weakness for complex and iridescent surfaces as well as for the play of light and shadow on a façade. He always worked according to the principle of just not letting boredom arise in the designs.

He simply followed his “flow”

Gio Ponti is generally seen as a trailblazer of modernism, but this is not entirely accurate and only represents an attempt to put his extensive body of work into one big bracket. It seems better though to assume that Ponti did not want to create any (own) styles or models at all, but simply followed his “flow”, as one would say today. This is particularly evident in his best-known building, the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan with its streamlined basic form, the almost floating roof and the construction almost without supporting pillars. This design brought Ponti worldwide fame, and he afterwards was commissioned to design everything from museums and churches to department stores.

For Ponti, the future of architecture was closely linked to communication: He founded DOMUS, a magazine that is still renowned today, and curated STILE – all of which were opportunities for him to share his interests with a large audience.

The book “Gio Ponti” is released as an Art Edition in addition to the limited XXL edition that is also limited to 1000 copies. The book, published by TASCHEN, is available here.

In the summer of 2021, the new Hans Christian Andersen Museum will open in Odense. The brand-new museum aims to rethink how the story of Andersen’s life and work is told. The museum will provide an artistic experience, which combines landscape, architecture and modern exhibition design, and it will offer new perspectives on one of the most beloved and creative thinkers in world history. The new museum was designed by the Japanese star architect Kengo Kuma and his team, the garden was designed by Masu Planning.

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Hans Christian Andersen is not merely one of the most famous and read authors in world history, admired everywhere for his fantastical fairytales. Starting in the summer of 2021, his amazing stories will also serve as the foundation of a brand-new type of museum, which will not simply communicate about Andersen, but as Andersen:

“We have to dive into the fairytales as the very first thing, because they are what everyone knows.The idea is not to retell the stories, but rather to communicate their familiarity and inspire further reading of Andersen,” says Torben Grøngaard Jeppesen, the head of Odense City Museums.

The vision for the museum is to spatialize the experience of Andersen’s literary universe and stage a complete artistic experience in which architecture, sound, light and a stream of images constantly create new encounters between each visitor and Andersen’s fairytales.

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New perspectives on ourselves, on nature and society

”Hans Christian Andersen’s artistic universe is fantastic, because it reverses how you imagine this world you thought you knew, but without putting anything else in its place. His fairytales do not point towards a universal truth, but rather into the open – towards the peculiarity and multiplicity of the world. In the new museum, we maintain this ambiguity by using Andersen’s own artistic strategies as the starting point for how the garden, the house and the exhibition have all been shaped, as well as for the many artistic contributions that will also be part of the museum,” explains Creative Director of the new museum, Henrik Lübker.

As such, the new museum will provide a space for the pursuit of puzzlement, the imagination and magic adventures, all of which will provide food for thought and create new perspectives on ourselves, on nature and society –both for the Danish and the international visitors of all ages thatrush to Odense every year to experience the birthplace of the poet, which will also be part of the new museum.

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Kengo Kuma and poetic museum architecture

The new museum is designed by Japanese star architect Kengo Kuma and his team, who are also behind the new Olympic stadium in Tokyo. As part of the design process, the esteemed architect has found inspiration in Andersen’s fairytale ‘The Tinderbox’, in which a tree reveals an underground world, which magically reveals new perspectives right in front of the beholder.

”The idea behind the architectural design resembled Andersen’s method, where a small world suddenly expands to a bigger universe,” explains Kengo Kuma.

The museum site covers an area of 5,600 square meters and contains a children’s house and an underground museum, which intertwines with a surrounding magical garden. On top of that, the museum will consist of a wide array of state-of-the-art technologies and approaches to set design, which will all add to the experience of Andersen’s magical universe coming to life.

Substantial donation from The A.P. Møller Foundation

The new museum is one of Denmark’s largest and most ambitious museum projects in recent years, and it has been made possible through a substantial donation from The A.P. Møller Foundation as well as contributions from Nordea-fonden, The Augustinus Foundation, Knud Højgaards Fond and the City of Odense.

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Text Credit: H.C. Andersen’s House

In Bastia, Corsica’s second largest city on the northeast coast, Dietmar Feichtinger Architectes and Buzzo Spinelli Architecture have designed the promenade Aldilonda, which means “Above the Sea” in Corsican, together with In Situ and the engineers of Sbp France. The promenade now forms a link between the rock and the sea and invites to take a maritime walk or a bike ride directly on the sea and around the citadel.

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Anchored in the rock, Aldilonda follows the cliffy coastline five meters above sea level. The rock forms the massive natural foundation of the mighty enclosing wall of Bastia’s fortress, which gave the city its name. Until now, the coastline under the fortress wall was only partially accessible.

More than a path, a destination with new perspectives on the open sea, suspended between sea and sky, Aldilonda becomes a spectacular event. The softly curved path contrasts the massive fortress and the rock on which the bastion is founded. The path nestles against the rock, leans against it, and breaks through it. Sensitively, the construction blends into the rocks, the rich natural space of the coast is carefully traversed.

Durability of the materials

The path widens out and offers places to rest. The sea can be experienced through the area covered with a transparent grid. The balcony is exposed to the rough surf; when the waves are high, the water penetrates the stainless-steel grid on the rock, thus reducing the massive force of the water. Hydraulic tests in a basin in La-Seyne-sur-Mer were necessary to determine the force of the wave impact at 14 tons per square meter. Special care was also taken to ensure the durability of the materials. For example, the reinforcement density in the areas most exposed is around 400 kg/m3.

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The acrobatic use of workers, suspended from the platform of the fort on the trapeze, made it possible to anchor the construction in the rock. Drilling jigs had to be designed to anchor the 25-metre-long tension bars.

The southern point of the fortress remains untouched

To keep the toe of the fortification wall, which stretches furthest into the sea, clear, the path at the south end pierces the rock in the form of a gallery, a tunnel. It connects the walkway above the sea with the “Spacimare” promenade by a gently sloping path at the exit of the tunnel. A vertical light well provides natural light to the passage. A staircase leads up to the elevated plateau of the fortress.
The side walls and the ceiling are made of fair-faced concrete. The wood grain of the shuttering is reflected on the surface. The lighting is embedded in the ceiling.

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One access for all

To the north, the path connects to a staircase that provides direct access to the old harbor. At the same time, a gently sloping ramp accompanies the quay wall “Jetée du Dragon” and closes off the promenade accessible to all, elderly people, people in wheelchairs and parents with children in prams, as well as cyclists and rollerblades.

The red ribbon

The safety is formed by narrowing uprights with a spacing of 110mm. These are made of solid Corten steel. The iron-rich rock harmonizes strongly with the rust red of the railing. An L-shaped profile, also made of Corten, closes off the concrete on the outside of the path. The individual uprights are welded to the L-profile and follow the undulation of the path. Frontally they offer maximum transparency.   From the side, they form a band that provides a sense of safety.

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Architect mandatory: Dietmar Feichtinger Architectes
Partner architects: Buzzo Spinelli Architecture
Landscape planning: IN SITU paysage et urbanisme
Engineers: SBP France BET structure

Text Credits: DFA | Dietmar Feichtinger Architectes

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Read about another project designed by Dietmar Feichtiger Architects on toposmagazine.com.

East Dike is located in Dapeng, a mountainous peninsula in the direct proximity of Hongkong and Shenzhen. In 2018, the typhoon Mangkhut damaged the coastline to various degrees. In 2019, KCAP+FELIXX has been selected to develop the plans, restore the coastline and raise protection standards.

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With the ‘Triple Dike strategy’, the team developed an integrated approach towards the climate adaptive reorganization of the 130 kilometer long shore. In the concept, water safety strategies are connected to eco-development and nature restoration and merged with social and economic growth. On a 500m long strip in Yangmeikeng, the performance of the proposed nature-based strategies for the sea wall are tested and materialization principles are explored and refined. The realization of this demonstration zone is the first milestone in the construction of 18 kilometers of embankment to be completed by 2021.

Strategic design projects for 6 villages

For 6 villages along the shore, all originating from fishers’ communities, the strategy is turned into strategic design projects, creating unique and site-specific realms. The ‘Triple Dike’ is composed of three development zones, carefully embedded in the local conditions and responding to the specific future needs of every village. The small-scale identity will be protected and their different characteristics reinforced.

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Village Dongshan is situated in a quiet bay, allowing the embankment to be designed as a green park, merging the mountains and the sea. Guanhu is a creative and cultural district. The dike performs as a vivid green beach boulevard, a backbone that unites existing functions with new recreational facilities. Moonbay is built on a mountainside, overlooking the sea. The embankment acts as a balcony, overlooking the bay, connecting the village to the floating fishing restaurants. Shayuyong is a gateway port, designed as a robust and rocky embankment park. For Pengcheng with its beautiful beaches and as important touristic attraction, the reinforcement of the coast is turned into an attractive beachpark. Yangmeikeng is an exposed village along the coast, within an ecological and marine protection zone.

Demonstration zone, Yangmeikeng

The three protective zones of the ‘Triple Dike’ in Yangmeikeng strengthen its exposed character, turning the village into a contemporary fortress. The design evades the introduction of a grant metropolitan scale and supports the organic village life. A rich collection of places boosts the further growth of the local culture.

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The first zone is formed by a collection of ‘rain-gardens’, as part of the communal space. The lush vegetation of trees and shrubs blends with the adjacent mountains and offers covered and shaded places. The gardens collect and infiltrate rainwater and wave overflow. The middle zone is composed of a sequence of shifting walls, with different heigths. They create a plazas and sheltered terraces on different levels, connected by a scenic walk. The third protective zone consists of ‘wave-gardens’, mitigating the impact of the flow during storms. They are planted with robust beach vegetation and rocks and offer places for picnicking and to enjoy the view on the beach. Walls and pavement blend in with the sandcolor of the beach. The materialization illustrates the characteristics of the three dike zones: more delicate materials are used for sheltered places, robust and solid elements are used for the exposed zones.

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Project Credits
Design team: KCAP + FELIXX
Location: Shenzhen, China
Client: Water Bureau of the Municipality of Shenzhen
Year: 2019 – ongoing
Area: 1.2 ha
Status: tender won, preliminary and detailed design for 6 villages in progress
Participating parties: China Resource Group (design and construction management), Hope Landscape & Architecture (landscape and construction design), China water transport planning & design institute (engineering), Deltares

The futures of building are now, and architects across the world are contributing to it. One of them is Mitchell Joachim, the co-founder of Terreform ONE, a nonprofit architectural research group, and Associate Professor of Practice at NYU. The architect and urban designer with degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities and a PhD in computation from MIT received numerous awards and fellowships, such as the Architizer A+ Award and Time magazine’s Best Invention with MIT Smart Cities Car. He began his career at the offices of Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei, and his design work has been exhibited at MoMA and the Venice Biennale. Topos spoke with him about his practice and his approach to architectural design, questions of resilience, the imaginative power of Science Fiction and designers-as-inventors.

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Topos: Hello Mitchell Joachim, great to have you in Munich! There are a couple of things you’re working on that I’d like to talk about. I had a look at your website, and it seems all things future …
Mitchell Joachim: Websites, they seem to be sprawling …

Websites! All things future, the term resilience, and what the outlook of the architectural and urban design profession is are things I’d like to talk to you about. What do architecture and urban design need to do to move forward? What you would like to achieve with your practice?
We’ve had a thirteen year run so far, which is pretty good. I don’t know what that makes me, mid-career, starting to become something more senior, I don’t know. But we did have a retreat recently, our board of directors, our partners, our cofounders, our executive director. We went someplace Upstate New York and we decided that we need to push ourselves further. There are a lot of folks working on environmental issues in architecture. There are a lot of folks doing sustainability. And that is a good thing. However, we decided that we have to change the game a little bit and be more responsible. We looked at this survey of how we do green in the United States, Europe, and Asia. There is a point system in place, LEED, BREEAM, Living Building Challenge, Energy Star. If you add them all up, and there is a group that did this in Copenhagen, less than 5 percent of those points that you get for being green go towards biodiversity. So, less than 5 percent goes to anything else, any other species or any other part of the landscape. It doesn’t mean it’s bad to get points for using a green facade system. That’s a really good thing. But if you’re killing a lizard or butterfly or if you’re complicit in wiping out some kind of fox or whatever is out there, that’s not good. Especially if you don’t even get points for it. Some of the systems don’t even give points. So, to be more effective in what we’re so passionate about, we decided to change our basic mode of operation. It’s going to be design against extinction. Everything we do serves to stop the destruction of some kind of creature. We looked at the statistics, the stats are sickening. We’ll lose a million of these species by the end of the decade. That’s like every other fish, bird, insect on the planet. We’re apparently in the middle of an insect apocalypse. Development does that. That includes people in real estate, people in planning, people who work in cities and outside of cities and in the suburbs, and not least, architects. We’re all part of this game that is fragmenting territories and destroying creatures. Every seven minutes – by the time we’re done with this interview – six or seven species will be wiped off the face of the earth for good. So, my kids will never see some of these beautiful creatures, even we won’t. We are destroying the world for the next generation. I think if we’re going to fight for something, let’s fight for something specific, the right to life. For other things and beings that don’t have voices. So we retooled our game, not just to work in the environment, that’s already a good thing, but to really focus on how it affects other species. Let’s do something different.

“We decided to change our basic mode of operation. It’s going to be design against extinction.”

If you would have to pick out something material and particular and architecture-related that affects practice as we know it thus far, in which way would what you do be specifically different?
We do everything kind of differently.

As part of a comprehensive approach?
Yes. Concrete, glass, steel pretty much had its century or two. Organic architects like Frank Lloyd Wright – I’ll just pick on the American [laughter] – he thought he was doing organic architecture, but it was really decorative. There are ideas about inside and outside, there were ideas about landscape. Certainly brilliant, part of the “American Sublime”. But it’s not organic. So, we want to use materials that are either grown in a lab, that are living in the first place or that are bits of nature without much modification whatsoever. As they are, tuned or tweaked for human programmatic use. So, whether it’s grafting woody plants into specific geometries, or working with complex maps out of e-coli, or projects that we’re doing with mycelium or fungus … we are working with crickets as a form of protein consumption. We’re always using some kind of living organism and rethinking the actual material. Biomaterials is the term. It’s not biomimicry. If anyone says I’m a biomimicrist …

You’ll get angry!
I’ll get angry. [laughter] I mean, biomimicry is OK, it’s good, it’s better than not doing biomimicry. But we’re not here to copy nature. It’s not mimesis. We’re using actual nature in order to learn from and with it. We’re doing a project that is about co-building with bees. So, bees are integrated in the construction process. It’s fascinating, because no computer can do that. I have a PhD in computation, and I can tell you, they don’t do that.

And you ought to know!
I would think so. [laughter] But then again, maybe the kids are smarter these days.

That’s fair enough.
And that is what made Gehry special. Computation would do one thing, but then he would mess it up with his hands. The hand is one of the greatest instruments for computation imaginable.

As seen in the Simpsons episode! [laughter]
That’s actually one of his, Frank’s, only things he has in his office. A hockey jersey of the Toronto Maple Leafs that has his name on it and a Simpsons image of him as a Simpsons character. All his other awards don’t mean as much to him.

And that is something one can be really be proud of! Thinking about what you said, it seems to me what you’re aiming at is a non-mortality oriented architecture?
That’s good, non-mortality oriented …

A non-deadly architecture?
It’s been coined here!

I tend to be a sloganizer, that’s kind of my secret superpower.
You’re good! [laughter]

Thank you very much, it’s much appreciated! I’m also getting an idea of how you might understand resilience. How do you understand it, and what do you think are the greatest inhibitors to achieving resilience?
Resilience in regenerative, also socio-ecological design thinking are very similar camps and they’re all extremely good. The challenge is a capricious public, especially in the United States. They’re not sure, they don’t understand it fully, the economics behind it haven’t been worked out long enough as to make a true commitment or turn in order to change the game. Neither is political leadership on board. If you want to get policy in place for some of these things, they want to have more science, more case studies, more examples before they’re going to vote for something that no one else is supporting. So, it’s the human factor. This silo mentality is the biggest inhibitor. Not the engineering, not the science, not the authorship of the design. Those communities are really hellbent on doing something. And more of such projects are being realized. Not fast enough and certainly not enough of it, anywhere, but we have to go there. Also, before you get to resilience in design, you may want to consider whether we should build anything at all – reduction in the first place is probably an even better principle. This is more standard to what happens in Europe than what happens in the United States. It’s so easy to build on virgin green land in the US. The idea that you do adaptive reuse is problematic, its just more expensive. And it’s really hard to convince a client to use a product like bamboo flooring if it’s three times the cost. They don’t have a hundred years of research compared to oak or some kind of stone where they know if they spill something on it or if they use a wax or some kind of cleaning material, it’s not going to damage the flooring or they even have to replace their floor. They want to stick with the things that have been in use in the building trades for a long time. And that, in itself, represents a certain form of resilience, but the amount of carbon required to create any of those materials is unacceptable.

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“It’s up to design to offer products or a kind of a system change that people can choose to be a part of.”

So, essentially, one factor is people, the other is politics?
Yes. That might be obvious bromide, but it’s a bromide that’s not easy to change. We’re also not used to changing behaviors. Some of this is really hard to do. I think it’s up to design to offer products or a kind of a system change that people can choose to be a part of.

Where does the inspiration come from for these approaches?
There was this exciting moment under Kennedy, the NASA program, which is a part of our typeface, where the United States said, let’s do something amazing – for the entire world. We went from Kitty Hawk, the first flights, in what, fifty years? to the Apollo missions. So, that’s embedded in our typeface. Not so much in terms of “let’s return to that nostalgia”, but a general “oh my gosh! let’s be visionary, let’s change the game and let’s do it” mentality.

How does this mindset inform you projects?
Through optimism. In that time period, also, coming from the 70s, when I was born, that culture I grew up in, it was just amazing. That’s when Science Fiction exploded …

Star Wars …
Star Wars is amazing. It’s becoming a myth equivalent to something like the Bible.

“Without these fictional narratives, we wouldn’t have the architecture that we have today.”

Yeah, which is scary!
Which is scary … [laughter] Without these fictional narratives, we wouldn’t have the architecture that we have today. We wouldn’t have iPhones. We wouldn’t have the world that we live in. It’s the scenarios that people comprehend, together, universally, like Mr. Spock’s tricorder. It’s amazing! As a kid, I never thought I’d have all the bits of information in this tool, talk to a ship in outer space or anybody on the planet while looking at plants and be able to find out what type of species they are. It’s basically Google, it’s everything in one. And that’s what an iPhone is, what these handheld technologies are. And we’ve accepted that. At first we thought it would be impossible, but this super-popular narrative in Science Fiction got us there. If you’re not inspired by Science Fiction, then you shouldn’t be in design.

That’s very inspiring, I would wholeheartedly agree with that!
Science Fiction is so powerful in architecture. And, of course, it also comes from the culture of architecture. A lot of people I graduated with went off to work on movies like Batman and Judge Dredd and make all the city scenes in Star Trek and Star Wars. It’s delivered by film, yet sculpted by architects.

In my view there is a disconnect between the futuristic potential on the one hand and the aesthetics of some products on the other – meaning that the final product can still have aesthetics that don’t immediately connect to being overtly futuristic.
So it won’t look like metropolis?

So it doesn’t look like metropolis, and instead, it’ll look like a typical Cape Cod house or whatever.
That’s actually a really good point. Having a classical Cape Cod house or an English Tudor or Spanish Colonial and the entire inside is a web of smart infrastructure, that’s where we’re headed. All the major corporations are doing that. Amazon is already in our homes, Google is in our homes, we use smart metering and thermostat systems to anything that controls TV and stereo systems. Technology such as engineered lumber is becoming super-sophisticated. So, it looks like the same stick-build from the 50s, but is actually a lot smarter and certainly heavily engineered. It could be pre-assembled, etc. So, it’s getting a lot better. The reason for the aesthetics that you point out is that banks loan money for houses that sell. And houses that sell look like what mom’s and dad’s house and grandpa’s house looked like. That still sticks. It’s always harder to sell a modern-looking house than something more traditional. I don’t know when that’s going to change, but that’s probably a 50 or 100 year shift. It doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing or a good thing.

It’s just seems that’s the way it is. Buildings and architecture are perceived by and recognized by the consumer, so if the consumer has a problem recognizing the product, the person who produces it has a problem, too. In terms of cars, I recall this one case where the former head designer of BMW, Chris Bangle, designed the new 7 model, and there was an uproar because that wasn’t what buyers considered a BMW 7 to be. The company redesigned it in ways that were more familiar to the customer.
And that’s a car, too. [laughter] So, I was actually in the car group at MIT, and we did a lot of design research.

Ah, ok!
We had cars designed that were soft and made out of materials that were incredibly lightweight, that were skinned over parametrically controlled ribs and other systems. And we tested how they responded aerodynamically. These cars were aerodynamic in more than one direction. When turning the wind force doesn’t have the same effect as it does over a stiff body. So we looked at vehicles that could change dynamics. The F1 racers did that with fins and other carefully calibrated parts. We researched suitable materials such as super thin carbon fibre. But there is brand messaging too, and BMW obviously has that. You don’t really have that with houses, unless you’re a starchitect. You make a BMW look like something you’ve never seen before … and actually, I love BMWs, the i8 is amazing.

“I’m sorry, but Rem Koolhaas didn’t do all those things by himself.”

Speaking of starchitects, it seems we’re moving in the exact opposite direction. Are they slowly fading away?
Yes. So, a really good friend, Bjarke Ingels, I’ve known him since before he was Bjarke Ingels … [laughter] He’s a sweetheart, he’s great. I think he’s going to be the last of his kind. I think working in teams that are more anonymous, that recognize that collaboration in teams gets projects done, is the future. I’m sorry, but Rem Koolhaas didn’t do all those things by himself.

He didn’t have to!
He didn’t have to. I think architects want to move, shift, work in ways which aren’t necessarily corporate, but in small, tight groups that have names that don’t necessarily celebrate one or two figureheads. It’s an ongoing trend. I support it completely. It’s something I can’t predict entirely, but I don’t see a great future in starchitecture. The term itself is derogatory. But people still want that messaging. Heatherwick gets building commissions, so people can say, “I have a Heatherwick.” So, the more these developers need it, that will be what they’re doing. They also pay a premium price for that.

“I don’t need to design for the super-wealthy to make the world a better place.”

Since you’re also teaching, what would your advice be to students?
Architecture is the best field on the planet and deploys the most powerful thing we have, which is the imagination. The most powerful tool humans have is our creative power, our imagination. Architecture is probably the best profession, probably art as well, but more so architecture, where you can learn to rationally move through a process and get things executed on a totally different scale. Meet your own messaging and your own kind of idiosyncratic selfish ideas, fine. But also make the world a better place and have a dialog which will last for centuries. Confront the work of people who worked a hundred years ago and do work that projects 100 years into the future. I think students can allow themselves to be inventors. I don’t’ think we really recognize that design is a form of invention. The designer-as-inventor-category, that’s where I fit in, a lot of my colleagues fit in. When you look at real-world problems and you work very hard to come up with solutions that are only limited by the power of the information you have access to and your own understanding of your imagination. Developing something that could work for almost no money and changes the game. When you design for the other 99 percent. I love that. I don’t need to design for the super-wealthy to make the world a better place. By using the power of invention and do products like the Life Straw or the Hippo Roller for women who carry water 8 miles every day, a barrel with a push stick, that comes out of the realm of design.

From what I’m seeing there is a lot more sensitivity with regards to issues of socially responsible design. Instead of people coming in and saying, “this is what we’re going to do”, employing a model where we say, “let’s ask the people who are involved.” Because in that case a product becomes more sustainable, where everybody can agree it is something that benefits those involved, and is not imposed from the outside or above.
At NYU, where I’m teaching, Decolonization is huge. Basically everything we have been teaching students thus far is “white men with beards”. From Socrates to Shakespeare to Foucault.

Also, when trying to listen to the voices that have something to say, sometimes they’re not the loudest voices.
That is totally true. I absolutely agree. We do have a “West is best” mentality. We have to, as much as possible, decolonize that and think about what is possible in a different context. I like doing the work I do, I like keeping it in New York, because I know New York. It’s a global city. It also depends on how woke you are. I don’t know if you have that term in German …

Yes we do! We have a different word for it though. [laughter]
Wohk.

Both: WOHK! [laughter]

Excellent! Thank you very much!
It’s good to be here.

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Mitchell Joachim, Maria Aiolova and Terreform ONE recently published “Design with Life”. The book presents essays and projects featuring new approaches in socio-ecological design thinking that intersect with architecture, urban systems and synthetic biology. “Design with Life” includes numerous contributions by guest authors.

Mitchell Joachim, Maria Aiolova, Terreform ONE (2020): Design with Life. Biotech Architecture and Resilient Cities. Actar Publishers (420 pages).

Cities are forever haunted by the ghosts of unrealised projects, as demonstrated by NeoMam’s recent rendering of an unrealised entry for the 1858 competition to design New York’s Central Park.

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We tend not to see the built environment as a product of chance. But what eventually comes to fill a space could just as easily have been something completely different. Designs go through countless revisions. Brilliant proposals are rejected for arbitrary reasons. The endlessly minute modifications people make after a design is completed are subject to forces way outside the control of anyone involved in the initial development.

NeoMam’s recent rendering of an unrealised entry for the 1858 competition to design New York’s Central Park reminds us that even the most seemingly timeless and treasured parts of the urban landscape were the subject of decisions that could have easily gone an entirely different way. Designed by park engineer John J. Rink, the entry proposes having trees arranged in several symmetrical patterns, with a series of concentric circles located on the park’s northside standing out most prominently. Unlike the Central Park that we know now, which was designed by F. L. Olmsted and C. Vaux, Rink’s design is much neater and more manicured than the successful design and much more akin to the French jardin. Although Rink’s was the only unsuccessful proposal whose plans still survive today, there were 32 entries to the competition in total. That’s 32 variations of probably the most well-known park in the world.

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Looking at a Ghost

There’s something rather uncanny about the rendering of Rink’s design. It’s almost like looking at a ghost, haunting the park and the city we’re so familiar with.

Sticking with New York, at around the same period, two curious unrealised designs for public infrastructure also strike a ghostly tone. Dr Rufus Henry Gilbert’s 1880 design for a pneumatic elevated railway would have had passengers transported through a pair of “atmospheric tubes” suspended by a succession of gothic-style wrought iron arches. Thanks to the Wall Street Panic of 1873, the proposal didn’t leave the drawing board.

In general, pneumatic railways have failed to catch on, despite still being entertained to this day as a viable form of mass transit – something seen most recently in the ridicule that followed Elon Musk’s “Hyperloop”. Because of this long history of failure, Gilbert’s design has an odd quality of being both retro and futuristic, and therefore quite tragic and even unsettling, since it upsets our idea of historical time as something linear and inevitable.

Manhattan Nocturne

The second design is Raymond Hood’s 1925 proposal to build a series of “apartment bridges” linking Manhattan Island with the mainland. Intended to ease congestion in the city and provide housing with spectacular waterfront views, the astonishing drawings he made for this plan are works of art in their own right. Recalling James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s nocturnes, Hood rendered the structure all in black, with the imposing apartment bridge dwarfing the cars it carries across the river and the boats beneath. It feels like we’re gazing upon a dream. Then again, that’s always what we’re doing when we look at a plan for something that doesn’t exist in reality.

As Darran Anderson points out in a 2015 article for Dezeen, these unrealised plans can prepare the ground for future projects, and these new projects can in turn lend legitimacy to the original failure. More than that, though, these unrealised plans give the lie to that all-too-common mantra of the market-driven urban economy “there is no alternative”. Instead, we see that the city contains within it an infinite array of alternate unrealised futures. Nothing that exists now was inevitable. Anything that went unrealised still exists as a latent potential, ready to be resurrected.

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For the original Source of the Renderings click here.

The Figueras Polo Stables are located northwest of the City of Buenos Aires, in a rural area where the horizon always feels far away. The vastness of the existing landscape, which is that of the infinite pampas, becomes both the perfect natural scenario for the practice of polo and the very essence of the project’s design.

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The poetic horizontality of the local flatlands seems to be emulated by every aspect of the plan and by every element of the building. This is expressed by the lines of the roofs of the two building volumes, which from afar appear as one single composition, the linearity of the free-standing walls that outline private gardens in front of the social areas and, especially, the manner in which the architectural layout is adapted to the existing trees.

A broad and luxurious avenue lined by London plane trees is the point of origin for the design concept. It defines the walking circuits for horses and conditions the building’s formal articulation. Differentiated into two separate volumes which, combined, house 44 stalls plus horse grooming and training facilities, the building’s shape was designed by responding to the positions of existing trees.

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The shapes are also present, as reflections, within an expansive shimmering pool lined with locally-sourced cobblestones. Positioned exactly in front of a large living room, the pool becomes an extension of the indoor area and serves as a continuation of the many overlapping outdoor and indoor spaces.
The building’s front elevation overlooks the polo field (270 by 150 meters) and the rear elevation envelopes the groomer’s quarters and work facilities.

The concrete roofs seem like floating planes protruding from the sloped landscape and serve both as access area and as platform for watching the polo matches. The recessed second volume is shuttered from direct sunlight by a series of reddish-coloured louvers. These vertical, patinated corten steel panels also demarcate the pathways for horses and help preserve a sense of quietness and privacy.

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Tiny, but essential design details

The maintenance of the horses’ health and physical appearance is of paramount importance in this place. For this reason, the site required very careful planning and incorporated areas for resting, feeding, exercising, bathing and drinking. Even tiny, but essential design details such as the ironwork for the stall doors are custom items intended to support every-day operational aspects and to ensure a low degree of maintenance. For every set of stalls and located at opposite sides of the floor plan, there is one elevated infinite pool built of exposed concrete that horses can drink from. This architectural composition – almost sculptural – provides a sense of seclusion that is strong, yet paradoxically inviting. In a literal and definitive sculptural statement, a seductive concrete spiral staircase leads to the floating rooftop above. Entirely covered by native grass, the large horizontal roof terraces seem to blend into the environment.
The views from this elevated platform with its natural ambience are overwhelming.

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Location: Gral. Rodríguez, Buenos Aires
Architects: Estudio Ramos: Juan Ignacio Ramos & Ignacio Ramos
Total Area: 3,600 m2
Date of completion: 2017
Photography: Daniela Mc Adden