JVS

Sem alçados mas com perfis. Tens o Conceito da Gruta. Aplicas a Gruta aos tempos modernos.

Esta obra é do Francisco Aires Mateus e não da dupla. A dupla acabou penso eu. Portanto era bom que o autor deste thread esclarecesse melhor quem é o autor da obra em concreto.

Na verdade este tipo de edificios já não se constroem mais. Isto foi uma experiência.

Pesquisa na net

Dados Gerais St. Tirso PT Comunicações, S.A. Francisco Aires Mateus Arquitectos, Lda Assistência Técnica 6 000 m2 Descrição O edifício, actualmente em construção, localiza-se num terreno com uma área aproximada de 4.700m² e com grande diferença de cotas (cerca de treze metros) entre os limites do lote, com pendente natural de Noroeste para Sudeste. Toda o projecto foi desenvolvido em conjunto entre a Arquitectura e as Especialidades de Engenharia, de forma optimizar e melhor integrar todas as valências que ele abrange. O edifício, desta forma concebido, desenvolve-se funcionalmente em três pisos. - Piso Térreo: onde se localiza o coração funcional do edifício: o open space com um duplo pé direito, Piso elevado com salas de descanso e formação,Piso Técnico onde se localizão todos os equipamentos e a Cobertura, constituindo protecção dos equipamentos que se localizam no Piso Técnico, e a zona central, rebaixada, consistindo num gradil metálico, possibilita a ventilação e tomadas de ar necessárias aos referidos equipamentos, bem como, integra o sistema de reaproveitamento das águas pluviais da cobertura. A solução estrutural teve por base os grandes princípios de rapidez da construção, a leveza do edifício e a versatilidade dos espaços interiores. A adopção de uma estrutura metálica periférica principal inserida nas fachadas permite a criação de grandes vãos interiores e consequentemente uma enorme versatilidade dos espaços, conceito que é reforçado com a centralização das prumadas técnicas em vazios estruturais. in http://www.afaconsult.com/

Teixeira exclui Brasília da lista de cidades que podem abrir a Copa – Correio Braziliense – 18/8 Publicado em 18/08/2009 por morumbi2014 Estádio Nacional de Brasília Logo cedo, comentei sobre evento que aconteceu na segunda-feira em São Paulo para a assinatura do contrato de patrocínio do Grupo Pão de Açúcar com a CBF. A imprensa destacou algumas informações, principalmente sobre financiamento público para os estádios. Até mesmo as farras dos jogadores na Copa de 2006 foi destaque. No entanto, foi em um jornal de Brasília, o mais importante do Distrito Federal (Correio Braziliense) que saiu uma declaração importante do presidente da CBF, Ricardo Teixeira. O mandatário disse que se tudo acontecer como o esperado, a abertura e a final da Copa devem ser realizados em São Paulo e no Rio de Janeiro. Teixeira ressaltou que não era um anuncio oficial, já que isso dependia da Fifa. Mas, é importante destacar essa tendência. Se o presidente da CBF diz que isso deve ser o mais provável, não deve ter sido a toa. A reportagem do jornal procurou o governado do Distrito Federal, José Roberto Arruda, para saber o que ele tinha a dizer do assunto. O mais interessante e importante é que ele afirmou que, caso o DF não receba a abertura ou a final, o investimento será diminuído. Ele fala até mesmo em reduzir a capacidade do estádio para 40 mil pessoas. Nada impede que o estádio de Brasília seja grandioso e bonito e com a capacidade de 40-50 mil pessoas. Fica até mais fácil tornar a arena rentável no longo prazo. E é por isso que é tão importante que a escolha da cidade de abertura aconteça o quanto antes. ps. A CBF divulgou uma nota negando que o presidente da CBF tenha feito tal declaração. Um dos motivos foi destacar que o jornal não esteve presente na coletiva. De qualquer forma, chama a atenção o fato do governador ter admitido reduzir a capacdiade do estádio caso isso seja confirmado. Segue a matéria, que volto a destacar, saiu na imprensa de Brasília: – Ricardo Teixeira exclui Brasília da lista de cidades que podem abrir ou encerrar a Copa de 2014 O presidente da Confederação Brasileira de Futebol (CBF), Ricardo Teixeira, praticamente descartou a possibilidade de Brasília receber a abertura ou o encerramento da Copa do Mundo de 2014. Embora tenha enfatizado que não se tratava de um anúncio formal, o dirigente disse que Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo somente deixarão de receber as duas partidas nobres do Mundial se não conseguirem cumprir o protocolo de intenções da Federação Internacional de Futebol (Fifa), o que é pouco provável. “Só Rio e São Paulo tiram esses eventos de Rio e São Paulo”, declarou o cartola ontem, durante a cerimônia de assinatura da parceria entre a Seleção Brasileira e seu mais novo patrocinador, o Grupo Pão de Açúcar. Os locais das partidas de abertura e encerramento da Copa só serão anunciados depois do Mundial do ano que vem, na África do Sul. Porém, desde que as 12 cidades-sedes brasileiras escolhidas pela Fifa foram conhecidas, em maio, Brasília começou a campanha para tirar o privilégio de Rio e São Paulo. Pessoalmente empenhado no projeto, o governador da capital federal, José Roberto Arruda, tentava convencer a CBF de que a estrutura de Brasília traz mais vantagens e benefícios do que o poderio econômico paulistano e as belezas naturais cariocas, principais argumentos dessas cidades para conquistar o direito de realizar os cobiçados jogos. O governador ficou surpreso ao saber da declaração de Ricardo Teixeira. “Devo dizer que, se não abrirmos os jogos, os investimentos para a Copa vão diminuir. Só para dar um exemplo, o estádio que precisaria ter capacidade para 70 mil pessoas será construído para 40 mil”, explicou. Infraestrutura Com a escolha para ser cidade-sede da Copa, Brasília ganhou do GDF uma série de projetos de infraestrutura — não só na área esportiva, mas nos transportes e na segurança pública. Ao todo, são quase R$ 3 bilhões em investimentos diversos, segundo os cálculos iniciais. Entre as obras está a reconstrução do Mané Garrincha que, em princípio, custaria R$ 600 milhões. De qualquer forma, Arruda preferiu ser diplomático em relação às declarações de Teixeira. “Brasília já está muito feliz de ter sido escolhida como uma das 12 cidades que vão sediar os jogos da Copa. Nós faremos todo o dever de casa para que isso ocorra da melhor forma possível”, ressaltou. “Além da abertura e do fechamento do Mundial, há a Copa das Confederações e, até que se chegue a uma decisão sobre esse assunto, muita água vai correr debaixo da ponte.” As eleitas Além de Brasília, receberão jogos do Mundial de 2014: Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Cuiabá, Curitiba, Fortaleza, Manaus, Natal, Recife e Salvador. in http://morumbi2014.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/teixeira-exclui-brasilia-da-lista-de-cidades-que-podem-abrir-a-copa-correio-braziliense-188/ VÍDEOS

4/04/2009 - 00h00 - Atualizado em 04/04/2009 - 00h00 'Nasce' o novo estádio Kleber Andrade A Gazeta Um estádio com preocupações esportivas, ecológicas e sociais. Assim pode ser descrito o novo Estádio Kleber Andrade, adquirido por cerca de R$ 6 milhões pelo Governo do Estado junto ao Rio Branco em 2008, e inserido no Planejamento Estratégico do Estado para 2009. Com licitação prevista ainda para o primeiro semestre, a ideia é que a obra, orçada em R$ 70 milhões, comece neste ano. Depois de pronta, a arena esportiva terá capacidade, em sua primeira fase, para 22 mil espectadores em jogos de futebol e 50 mil para eventos em geral. Na área esportiva e social, além do estádio de futebol, os capixabas contarão com cinco quadras poliesportivas e centros de ginástica, artes marciais, refeitório, museu e centro de vivência, tudo em um prédio de dois andares, chamado de "Edifício Educacional". Responsável pela execução do projeto juntamente com o arquiteto paulista Ciro Pirondi, a arquiteta capixaba Sheila Basílio visitou o Estádio da Cidadania, em Volta Redonda, no Rio de Janeiro, para observar o modelo usado na gestão e construção da praça esportiva. "Quisemos fazer diferente, dentro da nova linguagem da arquitetura, que é voltada para a mobilidade e execução fácil. O conceito do Estádio da Cidadania é bem parecido com o nosso. O estádio terá atividades todos os dias e não apenas futebol ", explicou Sheila. Sonho da comunidade esportiva capixaba e idealizado pela diretoria do Rio Branco na década de 70, o Kleber Andrade seria o terceiro maior estádio privado do país, com capacidade para 80 mil torcedores. Mas as dificuldades financeiras brecaram a obra. Mesmo assim, muita coisa que já foi feita será aproveitada. "Uma faixa de arquibancada nós vamos recuperar. O subsolo existente também será aproveitado", explicou Sheila. O secretário de Esportes, Luciano Rezende, garante que o novo Kleber Andrade será um exemplo ambiental. "É um estádio verde, com reutilização da água e com uso de energia solar. Será um estádio ecologicamente inteligente", afirma. Nem a pista olímpica de atletismo, não recomendada pela Fifa por afastar o público do gramado, é vista como problema. "Você perde e ganha. Com a pista, há uma destinação mais ampla. A pista colocará o estádio apto para receber competições de alto nível no atletismo". Gestão de arena para servir ao futebol capixaba O futebol capixaba vê no novo Kleber Andrade a chance de voltar a conquistar espaço no cenário nacional. Para Luciano Rezende, ao contrário de outros estádios do país, o Kleber Andrade não será tão "caro" para os clubes. "Esse tipo de questão tem que ser resolvida com um modelo de gestão adequada. O estádio tem de servir ao futebol capixaba. O Maracanã é um estádio de 100 mil lugares e aqui será de 22 mil na primeira etapa. Não ficaria tão caro para utilizá-lo e o Kleber Andrade também será utilizado para outros fins". Presidente do Rio Branco, Maurício Duque espera que o Governo faça uma parceria com os clubes. "No Rio de Janeiro, a parte dos clubes de futebol é subsidiada. A gente espera que o Governo do Estado repita a mesma estratégia, cobrando taxas em valores reduzidos", explicou Maurício Duque. in http://gazetaonline.globo.com/_conteudo/2009/04/507875-nasce+o+novo+estadio+kleber+andrade.html VIDEOS

Descobri que o projecto foi alterado.

O projeto da Arena Fonte Nova para a Copa de 2014 foi aprovado. Na tarde da segunda-feira (24), a Secopa, secretaria ligada aos assuntos do mundial no Brasil, recebeu a carta de posicionamento do Comitê Organizador Local (COL) da Fifa sobre o andamento do projeto. “Após analisar a documentação que nos foi oferecida, e desde que sejam observadas as demais disposições desta Carta e de seu anexo, informamos que o projeto está em consonância com os requerimentos Fifa preconizados até a presente data para a realização de partidas da Copa do Mundo Fifa de 2014, tendo em vista as demandas mínimas necessárias para a Fase Quartas de Final”, diz o texto. in http://portaldobeiru.com/-noticias/-noticias/866-fifa-aprova-projeto-da-fonte-nova-para-copa.html VÍDEOS

Novas Fotografias do Edifício Construção e Interiores. via Skyscrapercity

Fotografias do Edificio via Skyscrapercity

Frank Gehry’s Beekman Tower rises above the Spruce Street School’s new home a few blocks from the World Trade Center site.By Julie Shapiro DNAinfo Reporter/Producer FINANCIAL DISTRICT — Just a few days after the Spruce Street School moves into its new Frank Gehry-designed building next year, New York will commemorate the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. Spruce Principal Nancy Harris wants to record both events in a documentary film. “It’s about our evolution and the community’s evolution,” Harris said. “It’s been a long process, both for our school and for the community.” Just as the World Trade Center rebuilding has been plagued by setbacks, so has Spruce. Principal Nancy Harris, left, and other leaders of the Spruce Street School stand in front of the school's new building, scheduled to open around the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. (DNAinfo/Julie Shapiro)The Spruce Street School was originally supposed to open in 2008 in the base of a rippling steel tower Gehry designed, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. But the opening was delayed by money battles between the state and city, along with developer Bruce Ratner’s trouble getting construction financing. While waiting for its final home to be ready, Spruce welcomed its first kindergarteners last fall in temporary space in Tweed Courthouse. The school will grow to serve about 150 kindergarteners and first graders there this fall. Harris envisions the documentary as a poignant way to look forward on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, while at the same time capturing her fledgling school’s first days in a brand-new skyscraper downtown. “It is a very personal connection for me — the way things come full circle,” Harris said. Elda Rotor, a Spruce parent leader, said the documentary would also teach Spruce students about their place in the larger community. “Hopefully these children will become peacemakers, giving back to the world,” Rotor said. To fund the film, Harris applied for a $25,000 grant through the Pepsi Refresh Project, which awards $1.3 million each month to nonprofit causes that get the most online votes. The Spruce documentary project is now ranked 112th in its category and needs to rise to No. 10 or higher to get the money. People can vote every day through May 31, when this month’s winners will be decided. Even if the Spruce documentary does not win the grant, Harris hopes she can still find a way make the film. “Every person in this community has a story,” she said. Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20100510/manhattan/spruce-street-school-looks-for-cameo-911-documentary#ixzz0pzWBhWOo

Zaha hits Rome It began as a jagged scribble on a page of lined notepaper. The scribble morphed into a sombre artwork in dark acrylic paint. And that, in turn, spawned hundreds of pages of computer-generated images in a small architectural practice in London. This weekend, Rome will feel the seismic shock of that scribble, whose sinuous re-expression in 51,000 tons of concrete and steel has given the city its Bilbao moment. Zaha Hadid's €150m Maxxi museum of contemporary art is up, and stunning. But for three hours or so on Thursday, the bow-wave of expectation created by Hadid's presence upstaged the building. It's what she does. After giving a press conference in front of 300 international journalists and Rome's most elegant culture vultures, Hadid was surrounded for 90 minutes by an amoebic shoal of cameramen and interviewers, two personal assistants trailing her like pilot fish. The world's most glamorous architect finally took refuge on a translucent plastic Louis Ghost chair at a table screened from public view behind an angular wall in the huge, triple-height volume of the building's reception area. Here, tended by her minders, Hadid ranged from subject to subject in the languidly playful way that has become characteristic: the dreadful cappuccino she'd just been served; the appalling outbreaks of intellectual masturbation at London's Architectural Association, where her drawings as a student in the 1970s caused a sensation; the repellent nature of smoked mozzarella; and the fact that her co-principal and chief proselytiser, Patrik Schumacher, simply wasn't eating enough potatoes. Most significant was the way she returned several times to recollections of the original scribbles that ultimately created the wall behind her, and the 100m-long galleries that lay, in skews and curves and giant shelves above her: "I remember every line of those drawings." Maxxi is Hadid's fourth completed large-scale building, but it is far more significant than the 2003 Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, the BMW factory near Leipzig and the Phaeno science centre in Wolfsburg, Germany. And Maxxi is not an architectural progression, but the very Ground Zero of her work. When she designed the museum, her studio was small, and struggling to get significant commissions. Her breakthrough triumph in the Maxxi design competition turned her from a largely occult architectural legend into a very public one. Today, Hadid employs more than 300 designers in a converted 19th-century school in Clerkenwell; dozens of blue-chip projects, ranging from opera houses in China to furniture, flicker across the rows of computer screens. And in this delayed revelation of her original big idea for Maxxi, Hadid's wait precisely mirrors Frank Gehry's experience: his design for the Bilbao Guggenheim museum actually began life in his earlier, but postponed, architectural concept for the Walt Disney Symphony Hall in Los Angeles. Maxxi is the well spring, the scribbled DNA that has informed Hadid's later work. There's a clear architectural link between the geometry of the BMW factory and Maxxi. In the former, part-assembled cars pass on tracks over diners in the canteen; in the latter, when it officially opens in May, artworks will hang from the concrete and fibreglass ribs whose striations form the top-lit ceilings. But what's this ferroconcrete DNA like? Does it make any sense – or is Maxxi just another grandiose architectural icon for the hard of understanding, or those who crave another pseudo-visionary wow-moment? The first thing to say is that Maxxi makes a much more complex and challenging physical statement than the BMW building, or Phaeno. The sweeping geometry of its form and its internal configuration are almost baroque in the way they modulate volume, light and glimpsed views. Exterior spaces are intertwined, sometimes dramatically, at other times with an almost graceful restraint. Inside, the drama is much more visceral. Heavy black staircases, underlit by white lightboxes, rise as if in flowing oriental brush strokes into the overlapping volumes of the gallery spaces. We seem to be in an Expressionist film set. Hadid's metaphors are very different. "The walls of the Maxxi create major streams and minor streams," she says. "The major streams are the galleries and the minor streams are the connections and the bridges." And in reaction to the mixture of an orthogonal urban grid and a diagonal street meeting one edge of the building's site, the architecture mutates into a form characterised by "bundling and twisting". That phrase is applied to every building designed by Hadid and Schumacher. So, too, are other conceptual mantras that describe the architecture of Maxxi as "porous, immersive, a field space, the notion of drift". The idea of architecture whose masses and spaces drift, says Hadid, has been alien to architecture but is well understood in art. "We take this opportunity to confront the material and conceptual dissonance evoked by art since the 1960s." That path, she argues, leads away from the sanctified object towards "fields of multiple associations and the necessity for change". And that's a bombshell of a remark because the creative bedrock of Hadid's architecture lies in the avant-garde geometry of Russian Suprematist and Constructivist art in the 1920s; an art whose response to modernity delivered simultaneous jolts of velocity and points of fracture. It was anti-object. But in buildings such as Phaeno, the sense of a sanctified architectural object, something heavy and locked in a specific moment rather than an expanding one, remained. The fact that Hadid is now equating her architecture with the dissonances of 1960s art means that phrases such as "bundling and twisting" may soon be superseded by ideas from new sources – and by different kinds of architectural form. The weird thing about Maxxi is the way it so vividly relates to her early student drawings, yet also demonstrates a move away from them. The architecture is another kind of art entirely, and the first of Hadid's works to react to the restrictions and promptings of its site with a deference that has not been seen in the past. The roof of Maxxi is one storey lower than the blocks of flats around the site, and the pale concrete has a soft appearance that almost matches the stucco of the 19th-century ex-barracks buildings on one side. The way Maxxi's façades are modelled and the way the bundles and twists of the form have been teased apart have turned a massive form into artfully arranged splays of ferroconcrete tagliatelle. Only time will tell us if Maxxi works as an art museum and incubator for new artists and architects – a 21st-century Bauhaus in the Via Guido Reni, a quiet street named after the 17th-century painter whose works John Ruskin described as "taint and stain, and jarring discord, marked sensuality and impurity". One can't help wondering what Ruskin would have made of the scribbles, and the concrete, that have finally put Rome in the art world's premier division. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...e-1820383.html

Old meets new in the new sumptuous MACRO in Rome Paris-based architect and urbanist Odile Decq was commissioned with the redevelopment and expansion of the Roman Museum of Contemporary Art in 2001 by Rome City Council. The main site of the museum was already the product of the restoration and redevelopment of the old Peroni brewery, an important industrial building from the beginning of the 20th century. The French architect was faced with the complex challenge to introduce a Contemporary Art Gallery in an old mixed industrial building. Decq welcomed the opportunity to transgress more conventional attitudes towards the integration into a historical context: the result is a convergence of ramps, illuminated staircases, a bamboo garden, roof terraces and transparent spaces with multiple cross-flows of visitors moving through the building. Perspectives are tangential, allowing chaining and sequential points of view. Space is not centred and static but in constant tension, expressing the sense of a dynamic equilibrium.The spacious foyer at the entrance will lead to a large exhibition hall, to the Art Café’ and bookshop. The central volume of running water over the centre of the foyer intends to create a sensation of freshness. The red « Z » running through the courtyard, the foyer, the garden, the restaurant and the roof is a projection screen. The new museum is intended as a space where the pleasure of the visit and the promenade reinforces and increases the pleasure of discovering the exhibits. in http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=10072

Arquivo Municipal de Loulé | Conferência sobre «O Bairro Operário de São Francisco, 1870-1900» Loulé: «O Bairro Operário de São Francisco, 1870-1900» é tema de conferência O Arquivo Municipal de Loulé vai receber no próximo dia 8 de Maio, às 15:00 horas, uma conferência sobre «O Bairro Operário de São Francisco, 1870-1900». Na década de 1870, o executivo municipal pretendia a transformação urbana de Loulé, retirando-lhe o aspecto de vila rural com ruas apertadas e casas térreas, “para a aproximar de um ideal de cidade europeia”, recorda a autarquia louletana, em comunicado. A ideia passava por construir prédios de arquitectura revivalista, vias urbanas largas e desafogadas, e equipamentos destinados à elite. “Propôs-se a demolição de várias parcelas do tecido urbano para rasgar largas avenidas, ideia que marcou para o futuro a imagem de Loulé”. Porém, em 1875, o Algarve foi afligido por uma forte crise alimentícia, levando a que muitas pessoas saíssem do campo em direcção à vila para aí encontrar sustento. A câmara e o governo decidiram avançar com obras públicas – uma nova rede rodoviária e a conclusão dos caminhos-de-ferro – para dar trabalho a estas pessoas. Outros indivíduos vão aproveitar esta mão-de-obra excedente e empregá-la nas suas fábricas de tratamento de frutos secos. Para melhorar as suas condições de vida, é criado um bairro operário, o Bairro de São Francisco, “que foi a primeira alteração à imagem da Loulé medieval”. A entrada nesta conferência, que será apresentada por João Simões, é livre. in http://www.regiao-sul.pt/noticia.php?refnoticia=105435

Shanghai Expo 2010 Building, Pavilion, Image, Architect, Design, Winner, News Links to Selected Expo Buildings lower down this page HEATHERWICK'S PAVILION TO SPEARHEAD UK CREATIVE INDUSTRIES AT SHANGHAI EXPO 2010 * Expo : key opportunity to enhance UK-China partnership through Arts, Education, Culture, Business, Science and Climate Change The Foreign and Commonwealth Office today reveals updated designs for the UK pavilion that will represent this country at Shanghai Expo 2010; its theme being 'Better City, Better Life'. Developed by one of the UK's leading creative talents - Thomas Heatherwick - the UK pavilion will provide a dramatic demonstration of creativity and innovation in the UK. The centrepiece of the UK's offering is the extraordinary pavilion building - a six storey high object formed from some 60,000 slender transparent rods, which will extend from the structure and quiver in the breeze. During the day, each of these 7.5m long rods will act like fibre optic filaments, drawing on daylight to illuminate the interior, thereby creating a contemplative awe-inspiring space. At night, light sources at the interior end of each rod will allow the whole structure to glow. The pavilion will sit on a landscape looking like paper that once wrapped the building and that now lies unfolded on the site. The landscape provides an open space for public events and shelter for visitors making their way into the pavilion structure. Inside the pavilion building is a unique visual representation of the UK's leading role in conservation worldwide - Kew's Millennium Seed Bank partnership - the largest collection of wild plant seeds in the world. By encasing tens of thousands of seeds into the ends of the transparent rods, visitors will be able to view examples of seeds of plant species that contribute to national and global conservation programmes. The seeds have been sourced from the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species, Kunming Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences in China - a partner in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew's Millennium Seed Bank Project. The seeds being used are taken from stocks that are both plentiful and readily available. They will create a stunning image of an alternative World Bank, into which is embedded the potential of life. Visitors will access the 'Seed Cathedral' by a series of walkways, the content of which will depict the role of nature in UK cities in the past, present and in the future. This design is already coming to life. Construction was formally started in March on China's annual national tree planting day; the UK being one of the first self-build countries to start work on site. Heatherwick Studio is acting in partnership with Mace, the consultancy and construction company, to build the structure. Thomas Heatherwick, articulating his vision for the pavilion, said: "The Expo in Shanghai will be an amazing event; around two hundred countries competing for the attention of seventy million visitors. Our task is to make the UK pavilion stand out. We decided to do this by making one extraordinary object; not recognisable in conventional terms, set in a calm open site. Each visitor will be able to explore both in their own way. Rather than making a straightforward advert for the UK, we want our pavilion to give each person a more profound understanding of the richness of contemporary UK culture." Chris Bryant, Foreign Office Minister responsible for the UK Shanghai Expo presence, said: "Thomas Heatherwick's pavilion structure will showcase 21st century UK as a vibrant and dynamic country full of imagination and panache. I am sure it will inspire the Chinese public to learn more about the UK and its wealth of opportunities across business, education, tourism and beyond. The Shanghai Expo is a chance to show China that the UK is a world leader in creative design; this pavilion is a big first step to achieving that." Ian McCartney, MP and Commissioner General for the UK Shanghai Expo, said: "We see it as a gift of friendship to the people of China - coming in the shape of a just-unwrapped package, with an intriguing structure at one corner, waiting to be explored. We want it to offer an engaging, memorable experience that inspires both the visitors and the Chinese public at large." Simon Featherstone, Programme Director for the UK's presence at Shanghai Expo, added: "Through research and focus group work, we are learning what local Chinese people currently think of the UK and what their expectations are of our site at the Expo. Research in China suggests that we are one of the top 3 sites people want to see but there is a lack of awareness of the breadth and depth of creativity and leading edge design in the UK. We hope to remedy that during the Expo by showcasing UK creativity, skill and talent - Thomas's structure is a great starting point for this." Paul Smith, Head of Kew's Millennium Seed Bank partnership, added: "This is a very exciting project and we are delighted to be involved in conveying the importance of biodiversity and conservation through the inclusion of seeds in this iconic structure. Kew's Millennium Seed Bank partnership is a unique project managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which, by the end of 2009, will have collected and conserved seeds from 10% of the world's wild plant species. Kew's Millennium Seed Bank is the largest seed bank in the world and its purpose is to enable the use of as wide a range of plant diversity as possible in order to enable human adaptation, innovation and resilience in the face of climate change and other environmental challenges." Alongside the Expo experience, an extensive series of events for both a business and general audience covering arts, education, science and climate change will take place over the 6 months from May to October a) at the Expo itself both in the public landscape area and the meetings facilities, :s in Shanghai and c) around other key major cities throughout China. Each event will exploit the interest and excitement generated by the Heatherwick-designed pavilion to deliver stories from the UK to develop existing bi-lateral partnerships and create new ones. The programmes, together with the UK Expo website, are expected to reach millions of people over the Expo period - even more than the tens of thousands a day that are expected to visit the UK pavilion. Visitors throughout China and internationally will be able to make a virtual visit to the UK pavilion to access information on the UK and participate in an enormous range of activities and projects on the Expo Bureau's own Online website. The public sector founding sponsors, led by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, are the British Council, UK Trade and Investment, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the English Regional Development Agencies. British Pavilion Shanghai 2010 - images / information from Heatherwick Studio 2009 in http://www.e-architect.co.uk/shanghai/shanghai_expo_building.htm Shanghai Expo UK Pavilion, 2010, Architect, Design, News, Engineer, Project Shanghai Expo British Pavilion : Building Information UK Building by Heatherwick Studio at the World Expo, Pu Dong, Shanghai, China 30 Mar 2010 The Design of the UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo The UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo expresses British creativity and environmental engagement at the biggest event of its kind since the Expo phenomenon began in 1851 with the Great Exhibition at London's Crystal Palace. Since then, there have been more than 50 Expos - which have also been known as World's Fairs or World Expositions - and the most spectacular have included those at Chicago in 1893 and Paris in 1900. The latter attracted 50m visitors, a record at the time, setting an early benchmark for a country's portrayal of innovation and progress. photos © Daniele Mattioli Held under the auspices of the Bureau International des Expositions, the Shanghai Expo will be the largest the world has ever seen. Staged on a 5.28km2 city centre site beside the Huangpu River, it features pavilions representing the ideas and cultural and commercial ambitions of more than 200 countries and international organisations. Visitor numbers are expected to reach a record 70m during the six month event, which runs from May 1 to October 31. The UK Pavilion has been designed by Heatherwick Studio. Led by the internationally-acclaimed Thomas Heatherwick, his design team won the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) commission to create the Pavilion following a competition that attracted a shortlist of ambitious architectural proposals from other teams led by Zaha Hadid Architects, John McAslan + Partners, Marks Barfield Architects, Avery Associates, and DRAW Architects with dcmstudios. Heatherwick Studio's initial design strategy for the UK Pavilion established three aims to meet the FCO's key expectation that the pavilion should become one of the five most popular attractions at the Expo. The first aim was to design a pavilion whose architecture was a direct manifestation of what it was exhibiting. The second idea was to ensure a significant area of open public space around it so visitors could relax and choose either to enter the pavilion building, or see it clearly from a calm, non-queuing vantage point. And thirdly, it would be unique among the hundreds of other competing pavilions, events and programmes. Heatherwick Studio sought an approach that would engage meaningfully with Shanghai Expo's theme, Better City, Better Life, and stand out from the anticipated trend for technology driven pavilions, filled with audio-visual content on screens, projections and speakers. In collaboration with a wider project team, the studio developed the idea of the UK Pavilion exploring the relationship between nature and cities. Rather than creating a conventional advertisement for the UK, this was a subject that could make a real contribution to the Expo's theme; London is the greenest city of its size in the world, the UK pioneered the world's first ever public park and the world's first major botanical institution, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. From here came Heatherwick's idea of involving Kew Gardens' Millennium Seedbank whose mission is to collect the seeds of 25% of the world's plant species by 2020. The design process evolved to produce two interlinked and experiential elements: an architecturally iconic Seed Cathedral, and a multi-layered landscape treatment of the 6,000m2 site. The Seed Cathedral sits in the centre of the UK Pavilion's site, 20 metres in height, formed from 60,000 slender transparent fibre optic rods, each 7.5 metres long and each encasing one or more seeds at its tip. During the day, they draw daylight inwards to illuminate the interior. At night, light sources inside each rod allow the whole structure to glow. As the wind moves past, the building and its optic "hairs" gently move to create a dynamic effect. photos © Daniele Mattioli Heatherwick previously experimented with texture and architecture at a much smaller scale with his Sitooterie projects. The Seed Cathedral is the ultimate development of this. Inside the darkened inner sanctum of the Seed Cathedral, the tips of the fibre optic filaments form an apparently hovering galaxy of slim vitrines containing a vast array of embedded seeds. The seeds have been sourced from China's Kunming Institute of Botany, a partner in Kew Royal Botanic Gardens' Millennium Seed Bank Project. Visitors will pass through this tranquil, contemplative space, surrounded by the tens of thousands of points of light illuminating the seeds. These fibre optic filaments are particularly responsive to external light conditions so that the unseen movement of clouds above the Seed Cathedral are experienced internally as a fluctuating luminosity. The studio's intention is to create an atmosphere of reverence around this formidable collection of the world's botanical resources; a moment of personal introspection in a powerful silent space. The Seed Cathedral is made from a steel and timber composite structure pierced by 60,000 fibre optic filaments, 20mm square in section, which pass through aluminium sleeves. The holes in the 1 metre thick wood diaphragm structure forming the visitor space inside the Seed Cathedral were drilled with great geometric accuracy to ensure precise placement of the aluminium sleeves through which the optic fibre filaments are inserted. This was achieved using 3D computer modelling data, fed into a computer controlled milling machine. This accuracy ensures that the Seed Cathedral's fibre optic array creates an apparent halo around the high structure, with the fibre optic filaments rippling and changing texture and reflectivity in the gentlest wind. The wavering external surfaces of the Seed Cathedral form a delicate connection between the ground and the sky. Among the Expo's sea of hard surfaces, the Seed Cathedral's surrounding landscape is conceived to act as a continuation of the building's texture. A special artificial grass surface has been uniquely developed to act as a welcoming and restful public space for Expo visitors. Beneath the Seed Cathedral and the landscaped surface area is a canopied and naturally ventilated entrance and exit sequence for the Seed Cathedral. This circulation zone, running along three edges of the site, contains a narrative of three innovative environmental installations designed by London-based design studio, Troika. They are: Green City, Open City, and Living City. Below the circulation zone is a further layer of spaces which can be used for cultural and commercial events hosted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and is available to hire by other organisations throughout the duration of the Expo. The creation of the extraordinary and complex Seed Cathedral structure and the landscape architecture was achieved through close collaboration between construction managers Mace, lead engineers Adams Kara Taylor, services engineers Atelier Ten and highly skilled Chinese engineers and contractors. In order to reduce unnecessary transportation, 75% of the materials for the UK Pavilion have been sourced from within a radius of 300km around Shanghai. It is also the British government's intention that most of the materials of the UK Pavilion will be reused or recycled at the end of the Expo. The UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office believe that the Seed Cathedral and UK Pavilion site will prove to be one of the Shanghai Expo's star attractions. Even before the start of the Shanghai Expo, that belief already has some substance; ever since Heatherwick Studio's design was first publicised in Shanghai in 2009, along with the scores of other national pavilion designs, it has been consistently ranked in the top five in terms of public popularity, and the Seed Cathedral has already been nick-named Pu Gong Ying, translated as 'The Dandelion' by the Chinese public. After the Expo just as dandelion seeds are blown away and disperse on the breeze, the Seed Cathedral's 60,000 optic hairs, each one containing the huge potential of life, will be distributed across China and the UK to hundreds of schools as a special legacy of the UK Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. UK Pavilion , Shanghai World Expo 2010 - Building Information Location: Shanghai, China Public Opening: 1st May 2010 Site area: 6000m2 Seed Cathedral dimensions: 25m x 25m x 20m Seed Cathedral floor area: 105m2 Optic fibres: 60,588 Optic fibres length: 7.5m Seeds in Seed Cathedral: 217,300 Landscape area: 4490 m2 Public park area: 2405 m2 Accommodation area: 1525 m2 Exhibition area: 1280 m2 Lead Designer: Heatherwick Studio Project team: Thomas Heatherwick, Katerina Dionysopoulou, Robert Wilson, Peter Ayres, Stuart Wood, Ingrid Hu, Jaroslav Hulin, Chiara Ferrari and Ramona Becker Main Client: Foreign & Commonwealth Office Project Manager: Mace Group Structural Engineer: Adams Kara Taylor Environmental Engineer: Atelier Ten Fire & Risk engineering: Safe Consulting Executive Architect: Architectural Design & Research Institute of Tongji University Supporting Architects: RHWL Quantity Surveyor Davis Langdon & Seah Walkway Exhibition: Design Troika Content Advisory Team: Mark Jones, John Sorrell, David Adjaye Content Advisor: Philip Dodd Content Coordinator: Adriana Paice UK Pavilion, Shanghai World Expo 2010 images / information received 300310 in http://www.e-architect.co.uk/shanghai/shanghai_expo_pavilion_uk.htm VIDEO

Heatherwick unveils final design for Shanghai Expo pavilion 29 June, 2009 By Anna Winston Thomas Heatherwick today unveiled the final design for the £13.2 million UK pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Work has already begun on site to build the pavilion, which was originally budgeted at £12 million. It will feature 60,000 7.5m-long acrylic “hairs” which will move with the wind, and have seeds from Kew Garden’s millennium seed bank embedded in the ends. The news comes after the curator and designer of the exhibition originally earmarked for inside the pavilion walked off the project last October after an argument with Heatherwick over content. Heatherwick described the finished design as the “world’s largest ever hairy building”, with the interior space sharing the atmosphere of “the manuscript room at the British Library”. He added: “I think you’re going to hunger for simplicity at the expo and we’re going to be looking at quite a serious scientific issue in quite a low tech way. “Sir John Sorrell and Mark Jones have been working with us on this because this isn’t just a shell. There is a solidity to its content as well.” Natural light, channelled through the acrylic spines, will light the building during the day while at night the structure will glow from within. At an earlier stage in the design process, the building was to have been lit with a number of different coloured lights, but this has now been scrapped. Installations and exhibits will be featured along a covered walkway leading up to the pavilion below the Astroturf -covered angled landscape which covers the 6,000sq m site. Plans for the legacy of the building, which must be dismantled and removed from the site after the Expo, include using the acrylic coffined seeds as an educational tool. Read more: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3143759#ixzz0mn0rk0cG in http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/30/shanghai-world-expo-2010-launch

April 28, 2010 Permalink Shanghai's Expo nearly ready Organizers of Shanghai's World Expo have been holding trial runs this week, before the official opening this Saturday, May 1st. About 70 percent of the nearly 200 participants participated in the trials, and visitors were already encountering long lines. Officials now estimate the 6-month event, themed "Better City, Better Life", will attract up to 100 million visitors, 95 percent of them Chinese. Shanghai has spent 400 billion yuan (58.6 billion US dollars) preparing for the Expo, according to state media - more than was spent on the Beijing Olympics. Collected here are photographs of last-minute preparations in Shanghai as they prepare to welcome the world this weekend. (37 photos total) in http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/shanghais_expo_nearly_ready.html

As you drive past downtown Los Angeles on the 101 freeway, one building grabs your attention, its concrete and steel tower swooping and twisting like a roller coaster. A multitiered group of oversize geometric structures arranged around concrete and grass courtyards, this complex is not, in fact, an amusement park. It’s the new Central Los Angeles High School No. 9, which opened in September. The building, designed by the edgy Austrian firm Coop Himmelb(l)au, tosses aside any preconceived notion of what a school should look like. But then, creative architects have always contradicted conventional school-design wisdom, moving beyond the one-room schoolhouse, the concrete superblock and (more recently) the mall-like gigantosaur. Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander’s University Elementary School (1950) in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, now called the UCLA Lab School, is a collection of restrained brick and masonry buildings with large windows, wood built-ins and, in some cases, sawtooth skylights, which are situated around shaded, grassy fields, a redwood grove and a creek. Taliesin Associated Architects, founded by Frank Lloyd Wright, created the Prairie School (1965) in Racine, Wis., a series of, yes, prairie-style buildings clad in red brick, their low-lying, elegantly curved profiles hugging the landscape. The Modernist pioneers Eliel and Eero Saarinen, with Larry Perkins, designed the Crow Island School (1940) in Winnetka, Ill., as a series of L-shaped “one-room school” modules — each with its own courtyard — to provide a sense of both intimacy and spaciousness. Nowadays, equally unconventional architects continue to brave bureaucracy and parental scrutiny in the name of innovation. Just a couple of exits south of High School No. 9 is Inner-City Arts, a nonprofit arts learning center in L.A.’s skid row that serves thousands of the city’s poorest students. The campus, which was designed by the architect Michael Maltzan, looks like a village, with theaters, art and ceramics studios, media labs, galleries, gardens and cutting-edge facilities carved sculpturally into the gritty neighborhood. Just a few miles west on the 10 freeway, in Culver City, the architect Christopher Ward has converted a concrete warehouse into the colorful, airy Park Century School for children with learning disabilities, fronted by a glass curtain wall with large green glass trees. Meanwhile, last year in Paris, Jean Touitou, the founder of A.P.C., opened his own preschool, complete with graphics by the fashionable design duo M/M (Paris), lest his daughter Lily be stuck in a drab state school. Assembled by the architect Laurent Deroo, the humorously named Ateliers de la Petite Enfance (A.P.E.) makes the most of its small space with clever design elements like plywood closet doors that double as a climbing wall, shelves and tables that double as chalkboards, Chinese lanterns and little Alvar Aalto chairs and tables. On a more spiritual level, the architect Robert Venturi and his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, last fall completed a slick new chapel for his alma mater, the Episcopal Academy, a private school in Newtown Square, Pa. Still, the question remains: do highfalutin designers really make better learning spaces? Steve Joost, the chief financial and operations officer at the Prairie School, says that while he absolutely loves the school’s design — including carpeted floors, wood finishes and human-scaled dimensions — maintaining such a complex can be a challenge. “It’s kind of like working in a piece of art,” he says. And Andrea Schoening of Coop Himmelb(l)au trusts that people will eventually embrace High School No. 9’s most exceptional elements. Says Touitou, “I believe that kids have to be surrounded by beauty as soon as possible. It just never hurts.” in http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/t-magazine/design/08turn.html

Architecture Review | Jean NouvelAt the Corner of Grit and Glamour Sign In to E-Mail Published: March 14, 2010 During the past few years Chelsea became a one-stop-shopping destination for high-style contemporary architecture as well as high-end art, and the results can be depressing. For every significant building that went up, the neighborhood seemed to produce a half-dozen or so inferior knockoffs. The feeling on the streets now is the same as it is in most of the galleries: the sheer amount of work, and the mediocrity of most of it, can make the effort of sorting out the good from the bad too painful to contemplate. Michael Appleton for The New York Times Jean Nouvel’s new apartment building is at 100 11th Avenue, at 19th Street, in Chelsea. Jean Nouvel Cut-out windows frame contrasting views of Manhattan. So Jean Nouvel’s new residential tower — at the western end of 19th Street, unveiled at an event this month — is a relief of sorts. It is a luxury building, and who would argue that we need more of those? But its mix of grit and glamour — embodied in a glittering facade that seems to have been wrapped around the curved front of a black brick tower like a tight-fitting sequined dress — is apt to temper whatever you may feel about the Wall Streeters and art-world insiders who are likely to move into its apartments. It conjures a downtown New York we once loved and can now barely remember, where rundown manufacturing buildings buzzed with cultural vitality. The building’s rough-edged sex appeal may actually overshadow what’s best about the project, the remarkable skill with which Mr. Nouvel embeds it into its surroundings. Rising on the brief stretch of 11th Avenue that doubles as the West Side Highway, directly across the street from the billowing glass forms of Frank Gehry’s IAC building and abutting a somber brick women’s prison on the other side, the tower is part of a taut composition of disparate — even conflicting — urban realities. Its shifting appearance in the skyline is a sly commentary on the conflict between public and private realms that is an inevitable byproduct of gentrification. That process has become particularly savage in New York, a city divided between big development companies that see architectural novelty as a tool for inflating prices for their luxury projects, and local activists who have marginalized themselves by their refusal to accept any kind of change at all. (If the financial collapse has slowed this trend, it has done little to alter the mentalities behind it.) Mr. Nouvel did not invent that world, but he knows that his name is used to sell real estate, and he understands that fashionable forms can disguise the damage caused by heedless market forces behind a gloss of radical chic. Like many of his generation — Mr. Nouvel is 64 — he retains a stubborn, some might say naïve, belief that architecture should make us alert to the conflicts that shape the modern city rather than conceal them. That attitude is apparent in the mixed signals the building sends. Seen from across the West Side Highway, the tower’s twinkling facade, with its hundreds of irregularly shaped windows tilted at odd angles to reflect fragments of sky or the surrounding city, offers a striking counterpoint to the soft, sail-like curves of Mr. Gehry’s creation. Rows of older brick buildings flank them to the north and south, and the contrast between glass and masonry, straight and curved lines, creates a nice rhythm along what was once a bleak strip of decrepit offices and warehouses. I prefer the view from the east, however, along West 19th Street. The side of the building is made of matte-black bricks and punctured by a few small sporadic windows, evoking the unadorned backsides of prewar tenements. All you see of the main glass facade is a thin sliver of steel running along its front edge. As you approach the corner, the facade’s riotous forms suddenly come into view, and it’s startling. Close up, the steel frames that support the windows look beefier, and the effect is more frenetic. A second glass-and-steel screen wraps around the building’s lower floors. Supported on a heavy concrete base, the frames of this screen interlock at the street corner like interwoven fingers, enclosing a small open-air terrace that will serve a ground-floor restaurant and bar. These spaces have no tenants yet, and for now remain hidden behind fencing and construction equipment. Some of the window frames have been left intentionally empty, so that it may take a moment to sort out whether you’re indoors or out. A network of heavy steel beams reaching up several stories connects the screen back to the main facade; the beams will eventually support big planters containing trees that will seem to hover in midair. It’s a nice surrealistic touch. Yet the punched-out windows and ragged corner also suggest an erosion of the boundary between the public life of the street and the guarded, private realm inside. The future restaurant’s terrace is made of the same concrete as the sidewalk, as if to suggest that it really belongs to the city. Glass-enclosed terraces off the lower-floor apartments will push out into the space of the elevated trees, as if the building’s residents were reaching out to grab more for themselves. These same tensions continue to play out inside. There’s a sexiness to the main lobby, with its floors and walls of sleek black granite and painted glass, and its fleeting view of a swimming pool set between the tower and the back of the older brick building behind it. Once you get to the apartments, however, that eroticism is mixed with a certain urban toughness. Details are simple and straightforward (despite the Viking stoves). The apartment terraces are reached through pivoting, industrial-scale doors. Mr. Nouvel imagines the terraces filling up with potted plants, bicycles and other odds and ends once the tenants have settled in. Conversely, the backs of the apartments have small cut-out windows placed at odd heights — some at eye level, others up near the ceiling — that frame contrasting views of the city: the clock on the old Metropolitan Life Tower; a caged recreational area on the roof of the prison; a sooty brick wall covered with pipes, the Empire State Building. The care with which the views are framed — reinforced by the windows’ simple heavy steel borders — is such that you can almost feel the city tugging at you. (The penthouse, not surprisingly, is the least seductive of all the apartments. Vast and airy, it could have been shaped by a real estate agent’s checklist. Sweeping river views, marble fireplaces, walk-in closets: these are today’s equivalent of gold faucets and sunken tubs.) Some will argue that all of this simply provides a veneer of civility to a culture that is sliding deeper and deeper into narcissism. For me, though, the building is a lesson on how to navigate an enlightened path in an era of extremes. It’s not utopia, but it demonstrates what a major talent can accomplish when he focuses his mind on a small corner of the city. in http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/arts/design/15nouvel.html?scp=24&sq=&st=nyt

Streetscapes | The United Nations One Among Many Ideas for the U.N. Site Avery Architectural Library, from "New York 1960," by Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman (Monacelli, 1997) A 1946 proposal for the United Nations shows a loaf-shape assembly hall topped by two towers. By CHRISTOPHER GRAY Published: April 21, 2010 Secretary-General Trygve Lie and Wallace K. Harrison, chief architect, laying the cornerstone in 1949. It is hard to imagine the city without this iconic glassy slab, but it was only one of a dozen postwar proposals for replacing the old slaughterhouse district. Suggestions ranged from a heliport to a concert hall. Like other low areas along the East River, the site of the United Nations was at first prized for industry. By the 1910s it was the home of slaughterhouses, the Eberhard Faber pencil factory, and, right at 42nd Street, the New Amsterdam Gas Company. In the 1920s, elite development along the East River overtook Beekman and Sutton Places, and in 1925 the architects Sloan & Robertson published a plan for a blocklong development with a residential tower and yacht club landing, apparently on part of what became the United Nations site. But in that period, such a wide swath was too difficult for a single developer to undertake. Then, in 1946 the ebullient, big-thinking developer William Zeckendorf came along, and in a burst of postwar enthusiasm, assembled most of the land between First Avenue and the East River from 42nd to 49th Street. Mr. Zeckendorf never made little plans, and for this site he envisioned X-City, a megaproject unlike anything that had yet been seen in Manhattan’s private sector. Along the river he placed a complicated arrangement of 40-story office buildings, 30-story apartments, and paired 57-story structures, one an office tower and the other a hotel. Between the tallest pair of buildings was a spherical concert and opera complex; renderings make it look like a basketball between seven-foot players. To highlight the project at night, an array of spotlights were to be beamed heavenward, great glowing shafts disappearing into the sky — an eerie prefiguration of the annual Tribute in Light memorial near the site of the World Trade Center. Mr. Zeckendorf’s architect was Wallace K. Harrison, one of the key architects of Rockefeller Center; the developer may well have considered the Rockefeller connection one of his qualifications. Larger even than Rockefeller Center, the project was a too-tall order for financing in postwar New York, or perhaps for any time in the history of the city. Mr. Zeckendorf had a wonderful plot of land, but no means to build on it. At the same time that Mr. Zeckendorf was buying land and commissioning futuristic drawings, the new United Nations was casting about for a headquarters site somewhere in the United States. However logical a choice it might now seem, New York was also crowded, expensive and distracting; the United Nations would wind up being a big fish in a pond of bigger fish. Philadelphia seemed likely, but in late 1946 John D. Rockefeller Jr. stepped in and took an option on Mr. Zeckendorf’s site for $8.5 million, intending to donate it to the United Nations. To inspire the site selection board to think East River instead of Schuylkill, Mr. Zeckendorf had Mr. Harrison tweak his X-City plans to include a low curved assembly hall straddled by both towers at ground level. It resembled two men riding a turtle. The United Nations board, persuaded by the free land and a strong New York faction, decided in the city’s favor, although it discarded Zeckendorf’s design: Even for a world body, his plan was too big. Mr. Harrison supervised a committee of invited architects from various countries who contributed ideas for the essential assignment, an office building with an assembly hall. For the assembly building a Soviet designer, Nikolai Bassov, presented an ominous, boxy shape worthy of Lenin’s tomb. Perhaps anticipating diplomats from other universes, the French architect Le Corbusier developed a design for a central open-air entrance covered by a curving hangarlike roof that looked like the landing bay of a giant space station. The Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer envisioned a Spartan collection of shapes, not unlike his utopian design for Brasilia, built in the next decade. In the end Mr. Harrison deftly oversaw the synthesis of many ideas without great rancor, although the testy Corbu went away mad that his genius had been underrecognized. While Mr. Harrison’s group of architects were uniting, others sought to integrate the United Nations into the larger city. Mr. Zeckendorf had the idea of ripping out six square blocks between Third and First Avenues, from 46th to 49th Street, to create a magnificent approach to the new complex. The wide boulevard, flanked by a procession of 12 slabs of varying sizes for offices, concert halls and apartments, would lead to the river and, at the end, a cable-stayed steel tower, perhaps 600 feet high. The American Institute of Architects proposed something similar, but all the way over to Lexington. These projects would have rivaled or exceeded both the United Nations and Lincoln Center in scope. But each also was a vision too far, requiring acquisition by eminent domain and the eviction of thousands of voters. In the end, only the south side of 47th Street, from Second to First, was cleared for a cold, lumpy porridge of a park, much better than nothing but still a leftover. The many alternative designs for the United Nations site read like a lost history of midcentury architecture In 1950 the United Nations began moving in, with the optimism of a fresh white shirt, a vision of how both the city and the world could look. But in the last half century much of that has worn off. The fortified aspect of the place is emblematic, its high civic ideals lost in the menacing character of high fences, metal detectors and concrete bollards. Too, there is nothing left of the ambitions of William Zeckendorf; without his implausible visions, it seems likely the United Nations would not be here — noble goals, scofflaw diplomats and all. E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com in http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/realestate/25streets.html?scp=4&sq=&st=nyt

Special Report: Shanghai World Expo Using Nature and Waste for Walls and CeilingsBy SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOP Published: April 29, 2010 Expo Offers Shanghai a Turn in the Spotlight (April 30, 2010) Most of the eco-friendly building techniques and technologies used throughout the site of the show are well known and proven. These include the use of plants on roofs and walls to help keep buildings cool naturally or the use of light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s, to substitute for customary lights. But some pavilions have gone further to promote new developments and environmentally friendly materials. The Finnish pavilion, Kirnu, or The Giant’s Kettle, is clad with about 25,000 scaly shingles made from UPM ProFi, a composite blend of wood fibers and plastic. Introduced in 2005, the material is made by the UPM Group, which also includes UPM Raflatac, a leading producer of self-adhesive labels and radio-frequency identification tags. The principal raw materials used are paper and plastic waste from Raflatac’s production processes. The recycled material is hard-wearing and water-resistant, essential qualities for an external cladding. “Prior to inventing UPM ProFi, there was no use for the byproducts of the label material production,” said Markku Koivisto, director of the ProFi business division. “They used to be incinerated or disposed of in a landfill.” Using the material on the Finnish pavilion gave a new life to 18 tons of former label waste, he said. Recycling plastics is also a theme for the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, designed by the architectural firm Atelier Feichang Jianzhu. Dubbed the Dream Cube by the architects, the pavilion’s external facade is made of a matrix of polycarbonate transparent plastic tubes, which also include multi-colored L.E.D.’s. The plastic tubes are made from recycled CD cases — more than 30 million of which are discarded every year in Shanghai alone, the architects say. Yung Ho Chang, the principal architect, said his office had been experimenting with various materials, including fiberglass and polyethylene, to build houses. Beside the recyclability of certain plastics, their combination of lightness and strength made them less resource-consuming than more traditional materials, he said. “For a one story polyethylene building, no foundation is required since it’s so light,” he said. “We know, because we built the toilets for our office using polyethylene pavement blocks for the structure.” The Italian pavilion, designed by Giampaolo Imbrighi, uses a new “transparent cement.” Each panel incorporates a matrix of transparent resin rods bonded into the cement, transmitting light without weakening the structure. “This is a further step towards more eco-friendly building materials,” said Enrico Borgarello, director of innovation at Italcementi, the Italian cement maker that developed the material. “The use of this cement permits a less intensive use of artificial light inside the building because it lets the outside light filter in.” The resins, in various colors, react differently to artificial and natural light sources, creating a soft, warm light inside the building and a clear bright image on the outside. About 40 percent of the pavilion’s surface is covered by 3,774 of the translucent panels. The Swiss pavilion, designed by Buchner Bründler Architekten, is enveloped in a mesh of aluminum netting that incorporates cutting-edge solar technology capable of powering L.E.D.’s. The see-through metal curtain holds 11,000 randomly attached cell units, each containing an electronic circuit board with solar cells, two double-layer condensers — high-performance energy accumulators — an L.E.D. and interactive sensors that react to light and activity in neighboring cells. When the light falling on one part of the facade increases, perhaps because of changing sunshine, or camera flashes, the sensors transmit an impulse that causes the L.E.D.’s on that part of the facade to flash, for a longer or shorter time depending on the intensity of the light received. The cell units react to each other so that a flash by one L.E.D. sets off its neighbors, causing chain reactions of flashes to swarm across the curtain facade. Another building with interesting environmental concepts is the Japanese pavilion, which officials compare to a giant purple silkworm cocoon. It has an intricate exterior layer of flexible solar cells designed to generate 20 kilowatts to 30 kilowatts of electricity. Inside, it showcases a range of small-scale generating and recycling technologies, including a floor that generates power as people walk on it, a window glass that incorporates a thin-film power-generating transparent solar battery, and a waste treatment device that can turn sewage into drinking water. As part of the exposition’s theme, “Better City, Better Life,” the organizers have also set up an “Urban Best Practices” area. Here, 59 cities, chosen by an international committee from 108 candidates and participating in a world’s fair for the first time, are showing how they are making use of new ideas and technologies in areas like street planning, the reutilization of industrial heritage sites and environmental design. “We wanted cases that were internationally recognized, and that would be valuable and could be followed by others,” Zhou Hanmin, deputy director of the Shanghai World Expo executive committee, said on a recent visit to Singapore. in http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/world/asia/30iht-rshanpav.html?scp=2&sq=&st=nyt

Square Feet | The 30-Minute Interview Daniel Libeskind Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesBy VIVIAN MARINO Published: April 28, 2010 He is currently involved in more than three dozen projects worldwide, including the massive New Songdo City, in South Korea, but is best known for his work as the master plan architect for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center. Q Are you disappointed that the rebuilding at ground zero hasn’t progressed further? A Look, it’s clear that this is such a highly complicated project. We’re dealing with not only the Port Authority and the investors and their own architects, but we also have different governors, and, of course, families of the victims, the lawyers and the banks. But we’re beginning to see some of the foundations. The Freedom Tower, as it used to be called — it’s One World Trade Center now — is under way. You can see it in the important corner that it’s occupying. It’s all gradual: the memorial will open, then Tower Four, then the PATH tunnel, then the Freedom Tower. Q How difficult has it been coordinating all the players? A It’s a constant challenge — democracy is never easy. I appreciate that there are different forces and my role is to bring consensus, and that doesn’t mean I get everything I want. You lose some of those battles and you have to compromise on issues, but you are never going to quit. I believe that what is being built is aligned with the ideas that were chosen. Q Tell me about those ideas. A First of all, this is a story of memory — so many people perished — but also memory of what liberty means, what New York means, that this event isn’t going to change New York into a sad city. It’s about the past, which is irreversible, but also the future. Q How is this balance achieved? A It’s 16 acres, and a little less than half of that site is for public space, so that it isn’t just crowded with a lot of buildings. And nothing is actually built on the site where people perished, so that it has a spiritual quality. It’s a park. It has waterfalls, which was part of my idea to screen the sound of the streets. At the same time, I assembled the buildings so they don’t throw shadows on the memorial site. Buildings facing the memorial have a different character than buildings facing Church Street. Q How important was it for you to win this project? A It was extremely important. I go by the site every day, I live by the site, so it’s not an abstract idea. I saw the original towers being built when I was in school. Q Before the World Trade Center, you had completed only a handful of projects. Now you have about 40. It’s safe to say this catapulted business. A For sure. Your name appears in the public realm, even when you don’t want it to appear. Q Your designs have a sculpturelike quality, which some may find jolting. Have you ever been told that they’re unbuildable? A Definitely. But I don’t find it as something evil or negative. I try to understand my clients — first of all, they have a budget. Q Many call you a “starchitect.” How does that make you feel? A I couldn’t care less. But the truth is people have rediscovered architecture. Ground zero had a lot to do with raising expectations, because it was a public process and people were very involved and there was an emotional resonance. I consider this a renaissance: a rediscovery that architecture isn’t just a bunch of concrete slabs, that it’s cultural and has to have a sustainable idea to it. Q Let’s talk about sustainability. A Sustainability isn’t just a reference to new technology, it’s a rebirth of the idea that buildings are not just consumer items. They’re not like cars or hair dryers or refrigerators — you don’t build them and throw them out. They have to connect with the place in which they stand. Q You were an accomplished musician, even playing accordion alongside Itzhak Perlman. Why did you switch careers? A I exhausted that instrument. And by that time, my interests shifted. I discovered mathematics and other things like painting, and I kind of stumbled upon architecture because it combined so many of my interests. Q Do you have any advice for aspiring architects? A Don’t just go with the trends — think for yourself. Think of the less obvious things. Q What’s your favorite building? A It’s so hard to say. Impossible! It’s like asking, what’s your favorite piece of music? Each building sets up a mood. Q Is there a style you loathe? A I loathe neutral architecture. The idea of creating a space — a box — with no expression in it. To me it’s a very violent act. Interview conducted and condensed by Vivian Marino in http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/realestate/02sqft.html?hp

Câmara vai integrar Sociedade Frente Tejo 10 | 03 | 2010 17.37H O presidente da Câmara de Lisboa, António Costa (PS), anunciou hoje que a autarquia irá integrar o conselho de administração da Sociedade Frente Tejo, responsável pelas obras na zona ribeirinha da capital. Destak/Lusa | destak@destak.pt “Neste momento estão criadas as condições políticas e há uma boa solução financeira para entrarmos na Sociedade Frente Tejo”, disse António Costa aos jornalistas na conferência de imprensa que se seguiu à reunião do executivo municipal. A Frente Tejo, uma sociedade anónima de capitais exclusivamente públicos, foi constituída através de um decreto-lei de 2008, mas, na altura, a autarquia não integrou aquela estrutura, responsável por obras como o novo Museu dos Coches e reabilitação da zona ribeirinha. A questão foi hoje levantada pelo vereador social democrata na autarquia lisboeta Pedro Santana Lopes, que durante a campanha eleitoral autárquica defendeu a participação da Câmara na sociedade. “Ainda bem que [santana Lopes] tinha esse ponto de vista porque isso cria condições para haver uma maioria para a Câmara entrar na Frente Tejo”, afirmou António Costa. “Todas as forças da oposição se opuseram [na altura] à entrada na Frente Tejo”, sublinhou. Na época foram igualmente invocadas as condições financeiras do município para que não integrasse a Frente Tejo. Sobre a dimensão desta participação, António Costa escusou-se a avançar mais informações, remetendo-as para a proposta que levará à Câmara em breve. Para o autarca, com a entrada da Câmara no conselho de administração da sociedade “ficará tudo mais claro e saudável”. Costa sublinhou, contudo, que a sociedade “tem trabalhado bem” com a autarquia, num “diálogo excelente”, referindo que “os projectos têm que ser aprovados pela Câmara e têm sido aprovados pela Câmara”. O projecto do novo museu dos Coches, do arquitecto brasileiro Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Prémio Pritzker), foi alterado na sequência de pareceres da autarquia, ilustrou o presidente da Câmara. in http://www.destak.pt/artigo/56583

Escrito por Bruno Vicente coimbra Edifício para receber turistas da UC pronto em 2011 Projecto superior a dois milhões de euros tem financiamento assegurado. Estrutura vai ser “porta de entrada” para centenas de milhar de visitantes e inclui restaurante, loja, auditório e livraria O Centro de Interpretação e Divulgação da Universidade de Coimbra (CIDUC) vai estar pronto em 2011, cumprindo assim o prazo original de construção, isto depois de vários impasses e incertezas. Nesta altura o CIDUC está em fase final de licenciamento, sendo a fase seguinte a conclusão do projecto de execução, explicou ao Diário de Coimbra fonte do Gabinete do Reitor da Universidade de Coimbra (UC). O edifício destinado a receber os turistas da UC vai nascer no Largo dos Colégios, entre a Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Coimbra (FMUC) e Colégio de S. Jerónimo, numa zona onde actualmente existe um parque de estacionamento (ver fotografia). O local de construção tem sido visitado pelos peritos nos últimos dias. O financiamento de mais de dois milhões de euros chega exclusivamente via PIDDAC (Programa de Investimentos e Despesas de Desenvolvimento da Administração Central), no âmbito do Programa de Requalificação da Alta Universitária. A equipa reitoral da Universidade de Coimbra encara a nova estrutura como um dos projectos mais importantes para o futuro da instituição. O CIDUC vai funcionar como uma espécie de “porta de entrada” da Universidade, destinado às centenas de milhar de turistas que visitam a UC anualmente. O novo espaço vai colmatar assim uma das principais lacunas da instituição, que não tem um espaço exclusivamente destinado a receber e a orientar os visitantes nacionais e internacionais. O projecto do arquitecto Gonçalo Byrne engloba valências na área do turismo, restauração e cultura. Um restaurante de qualidade acima da média, uma livraria da Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra com 180 metros quadrados, um auditório, um posto de informação e uma loja com lembranças são alguns exemplos do que vai nascer no CIDUC. Segundo a Universidade de Coimbra cerca de 600 mil pessoas circulam anualmente no Paço das Escolas, um dos espaços museológicos mais visitados em Portugal. Por ano há cerca de 200 mil bilhetes emitidos e pagos, mas o número real de visitas é bem superior, uma vez que muitos dos turistas optam apenas por circular na zona, sem comprar bilhete para visitar locais específicos. O Centro de Interpretação e Divulgação vai “explorar” em toda a linha o enorme fluxo de turistas que chega anualmente à Universidade de Coimbra. Se o projecto tiver sucesso vai traduzir-se num significativo encaixa financeiro para a instituição. A construção do CIDUC está inserida numa série de obras orçadas em cerca de 30 milhões de euros com arranque previsto para este ano, incluídas no programa “Cidade/Univers©idade”. O objectivo é requalificar a zona da Alta Universitária, avançando com a candidatura a Património Mundial da UNESCO. in http://www.diariocoimbra.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6520&Itemid=135