Architectural Record 宣佈 Design Vanguard 2008 得主名單

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美國 Architectural Record 建築雜誌每年到十二月都會公佈十組「Design Vanguard(設計前鋒、設計先鋒)」得主名單，將「Design Vanguard」頭銜給予來自全世界各地的年輕建築師事務所以資鼓勵。

出處

Change swept across the political and economic landscape this year but has yet to make a significant imprint on the sphere of architecture. Rather than charting new courses or promoting new concepts of design, emerging architects—who are usually the ones at the forefront of new developments in their profession—seemed more intent on refining their craft. None of the firms in this year's Design Vanguard tried to overturn the current order or present a radically new vision of architecture. No bomb-throwers here.

What these firms did instead was explore form and context, materiality and construction. Reflecting the busy times in which they have been working, they built a lot and created some stunning projects: houses that provoke thought while satisfying the senses, places for art that engage visitors, new buildings that initiate dialogues with old ones. Although relatively young, the architects have developed bodies of work with significant numbers of completed projects—from small installations for exhibitions to major public buildings. Several of the firms have multicultural backgrounds and are working in more than one country. Others have studied abroad, then returned home with their intellectual horizons expanded. Globalization has become a fact of life even for small practices.

As the financial meltdown of 2008 plays out in 2009 and beyond, construction will certainly slow down and commissions (especially for emerging architects) will probably dry up. In a year or two, the ratio of built-to-unbuilt work from our Design Vanguard firms may shift noticeably. That will bring economic pain, but it may also unleash new ways of thinking about and executing architecture for all architects, not only for the Vanguard. For better and for worse, a new economic order will shake things up.


Design Vanguard 2008 得主名單

Atelier Zhanglei 張雷建築工作室
Atelier Zhanglei rubs the universal against the particular to create tension.

BRS Architects
BRS Architectes combines three approaches under a single philosophy.

Cadaval & Sola-Morales
Cadaval & Sola-Morales moves easily between multiple cultures.

Daniel Bonilla Arquitectos
Daniel Bonilla looks at architecture with an eye for urban design.

Gianni Botsford
Gianni Botsford develops high-tech tools to make buildings for people.

Kuehn Malvezzi
Kuehn Malvezzi finds the art in making more with less.

MOS
MOS brings intensity and wry humor to its work on many scales.

Smiljan Radic
Smiljan Radic creates works inspired by the ancients, and the everyday.

Suppose Design Office (谷尻誠)
Makoto Tanijiri (谷尻誠) works outside Japan's usual web of relationships.

Urban A&O
Urban A&O deploys digital dexterity to define space and sculpt form.

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Atelier Zhanglei 張雷建築工作室

設計理念

一方面，建築是一項幾乎可以和我們今天社會所有物質與非物質因素發生關係的複雜的工作；而另一方面，它又可以被抽象到最基本的空間圍合狀態，來面對它所必須解決的基本的適用問題，幫助我們在這個紛亂的世界裡建立某種視覺秩序和生活場所。

我們生活在一個高度信息化的社會，身體和思想都無時無刻不在遭遇無盡的慾望的衝擊，構築自身認知事物的框架，建立堅定的工作準則在這個意義上顯得尤為重要。形式認知過程中排除多餘的因素也同樣是理性的應對建築問題的關鍵。我們觀察與理解建築，首先依賴的是感覺，然後才用頭腦，分析總是在直覺之後才會起作用，必須引起注意的是，物質不斷積累的商品社會消費經濟正誘使我們喪失對基本事物的本質性直覺與判斷力。

設計的目標是建立某種秩序，它不是指建立完美的秩序，而是一種雙重的規劃，在混亂與秩序中找到平衡。用最簡單、最直接的空間組織和建造方式去解決問題，用普通的材料和通用的方法去回應複雜的要求，從普通的素材中發掘具有表現力的組織關係，在任何條件下都是設計所應該關注的。我們始終相信建築本體的潛在力量，更相信形式生成的基本動力應該也完全有能力來自建築本身。

設計都是在為明天工作，不論這個明天會是多久多長。我們創造的建築也是生命有機體，它有自己的個性、會以恰當的方式表達自我。每個設計都應該是溫故知新面對未知的將來認真思索的結果，它要能夠經得起歷史的檢驗。

參加競圖

南京大學仙林新校區圖書館國際競賽第一名(2007)
深圳當代美術館及城市規劃展覽館國際競賽(2007)
江蘇省美術館新館國際邀請投標專家評審第一名(2005)
侵華日軍南京大屠殺紀念館二期工程國際邀請競賽(2005)
浙江省美術館國際邀請競賽(2003)
中國國家大劇院國際邀請競賽(1998)

獲得獎項

第三屆WA中國建築獎 2006
教育部優秀建築設計一等獎 2005
首屆中國建築藝術獎 2004
江蘇省優秀建築設計一等獎 2004、2001
首屆WA中國建築獎 2002

重要設計案

江蘇軟件園吉山基地 2006-2008
杭州萬科南都房產"玉鳥流蘇" 2005-2008
新四軍江南指揮部展覽館 2005-2007
南京琅琊路混凝土住宅 2005-2007
高淳詩人住宅 2005-2007
南京建鄴體育大廈 2004-2005
東莞理工學院教工生活區 2002-2004
國家遺傳工程小鼠資源庫辦公實驗樓 2002-2003
南京大學陶園研究生公寓 2001-2002
南通外國語學校學生宿舍 1988-1989

出版物

Brick House, 05/2008 Domus, Milan
張雷和他的建築實踐, a+u中文版 2008 020
Y計劃-生長的痕跡《世界建築》 2008/03
青城山水《世界建築》 2008/03
歷史即快感-張雷設計的新四軍江南指揮部展覽館 《時代建築》2008/02
裂縫的辯證法 Domus中文版 2008 018
AZL-Atelier Zhanglei Show & Sales Room, Qingpu, 1'ARCA 02/2008, Milan
Zhang Lei/ATELIER Zhang Lei, On the Edge Ten Architects From China, 2007, Rizzoli
AZL Atelier Zhang Lei, Architecture in China, 2007, Taschen
Zhang Lei, Simplified Complexity in The new Town, 46 Oris, 2007, Zagrab
Staff Residence, Dongguan Institute of Technology, in 32bny, no.5/6, 2005, New York
Atelier Zhanglei, AREA 78 2005, Italy
Eduard Kögel, Caroline Klein: MADE IN CHINA. Neue chinesische Architektur, München 2005, Germany
折中之道-青浦支家弄街區改造的城市策略 《時代建築》 2005/05
《基本建築》 中國建築工業出版社, 2004
青年建築師檔案系列05--張雷 《台灣建築》2004/09
東莞理工學院教工生活區 《時代建築》 2004/06
Red Classic Art Museum, EGG, July 2004
學生宿舍的類型與形式初探 《世界建築》 2003/10
國家遺傳工程小鼠資源庫 《世界建築》 2003/05
南京大學圖書館改擴建工程實錄 《設計新潮》 2002/10
基本空間的組織 《時代建築》 2002/05
張雷設計兩例 《ID+C室內設計與裝修》 2002/10
Catalog: TU MU-Young Architecture From China, Aedes Gallery, Berlin
Studentenwohnheim der Nanjing-Universitat, Bauwelt 35, 2001, Germany

最新設計案

方力鈞美術館 2008-2009
杭州西溪藝術集合村2008-2009
南京仙林幼兒園 2008-2009
蘇州山塘別墅 2006-2008

展覽

法國建築與文化遺產之城"中國當代建築展" (2008.06) 巴黎 巴塞羅那
中國建設：五個項目/五個故事 (2008.02) 美國紐約
首屆香港深圳建築與城市雙城雙年展 (2008.01) 香港
荷蘭建築協會"中國當代建築展" (2006.06) 鹿特丹
意大利米蘭技術大學建築學院 "中國建築-傳統與轉換" (2006.04) 米蘭
首屆深圳城市與建築雙年展 (2005.12) 深圳
第二屆廣州三年展 (2005.11) 廣州
意大利帕爾馬建築節"建築-富裕與貧困" (2005.09) 帕爾馬
狀態-中國當代青年建築師8人展 (2004.05) 北京
法國波爾多"東西南北-中國青年建築師的當代性" (2004.05) 波爾多
德國杜塞爾多夫"中國當代建築展" (2003.10) 杜塞爾多夫
中國國際建築藝術實踐展 (2003.8) 南京
法國蓬皮杜藝術中心"中國當代藝術展" (2003.6) 巴黎
第四屆上海雙年展 (2002.11) 上海
上海"土木回家"中國新一代建築展 (2002.8) 上海
柏林Aedes畫廊"土木"中國新建築展 (2001.9) 柏林


Atelier Zhanglei rubs the universal against the particular to create tension.
By Clifford A. Pearson

They swim thousands of miles away, then return years later as mature adults to their place of birth. Their compatriots call them hai gai, or “sea turtles,” likening their years studying abroad and their return home to the long-distance migratory patterns of those hard-shelled creatures with unfailing memories. Like many of his generation, Zhang Lei went far away for his graduate education—in his case, the ETH in Zurich—but came back to China to participate in a booming economy and a cultural renaissance. In Switzerland, Zhang learned a disciplined, rational approach to architecture and a precise way of dealing with materials. “Over there, they build buildings like they do watches,” says Zhang, who graduated from the ETH in 1993, then returned to Asia to teach in Hong Kong and Nanjing before starting Atelier Zhanglei in Nanjing in 2000.

Since establishing his own firm, Zhang has slowly adapted Swiss precision to the realities of building in China. But the local challenges, instead of compromising the integrity of his work, have added layers of meaning—bringing the native and particular into an intriguing dialogue with the more universal and absolute in his architecture. You can see this bicultural fusion in a pair of projects he completed in 2007: Slit House and Brick Houses. In plan and organization, both projects exhibit the rigor of Swiss Modernism. But in their handling of materials and their siting, they acknowledge local building traditions. Slit House, for example, echoes the massing and masonry construction of its gray-brick neighbors from the 1920s while reinterpreting them with more severe lines in concrete. Likewise, the Brick Houses he designed for a pair of friends in Nanjing clearly refer to old Chinese courtyard houses but introduce a radical treatment for the traditional material. Executed by someone else, these buildings could have seemed confused or awkward; done by Zhang, they resonate with a remarkable tension between different places and eras.

“Materials are very important to me,” says the architect. “But they don’t have to be special materials; they can be common ones that I treat in unusual ways. I want to create a logic in the skin of the building.”

Looking at the 20-year-long building boom in China, Zhang muses that “prosperity has meant chaos.” Although Nanjing has experienced rapid growth in recent years, it is “a little quieter than Beijing or Shanghai,” he says. Zhang likes it that way. “It helps keep my practice smaller and gives me a little more time to think about what I am doing.” One of the things he strives for in his projects is “to create some calmness. This is my personality.”

As Zhang’s professional profile has risen with the publication and exhibition of his work in China and abroad, he has begun to design projects farther afield from Nanjing. Current commissions include buildings in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu (in Sichuan province), and Tianjin (east of Beijing). Although he is vice dean at Nanjing University’s School of Architecture, he is teaching less now and growing his practice. He is particularly interested at this time in working on projects that have an impact on the urban context. And he sees his work fusing the rationalism he learned in Zurich with something more local, “more mysterious.”

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BRS Architects

BRS Architectes combines three approaches under a single philosophy.

By William Hanley

When the French city of Montceau-les-Mines wanted to revitalize its historic center, officials envisioned a series of architectural landmarks bringing new life to the down-on-its-luck former mining town. In a move typical of this type of rejuvenation scheme, the plan included spaces for the city’s primary cultural institutions and public plazas along a canal. But it also called for the unusual addition of a robotics-engineering laboratory.

Named the Maison de l’Innovation, the project needed to be a self-consciously contemporary civic landmark. It also had to provide proper conditions for developing delicate computer and mechanical systems, while at the same time respecting the surrounding environment of old-growth trees and 19th-century buildings.

The tension between these conflicting demands appealed to Paris and Cologne–based BRS Architectes Ingénieurs/Groupe DNA. The 11-year-old firm prides itself on a holistic approach to design, urban context, engineering, and logistics that can solve problems presented by complex sites and programs. BRS achieves that level of integration paradoxically through the divergent skill sets of its three founding partners.

“It’s a question of scale,” says Uli Seher, the partner who looks at the macro level of his firm’s projects. “I take the urban approach,” he says. “I look at the surrounding built environment, the history, the context.” Seher also serves as a spokesperson, taking the lead on communicating with clients.

Jean-Michel Reynier handles concept and design. “The architectural approach,” he says. And Agnès Bertholon looks at the micro, assessing feasibility, logistics, and project phasing.

While they have separate specializations, the partners bring a common philosophy to their projects. “We believe in integrated architecture, where engineering is very important,” says Seher.

On the Maison de l’Innovation project, Reynier was the first to visit the site. For his initial concept, he decided that the building should refer to both its surrounding environment and the technology-focused program. Since the client’s work inside would center on a Faraday box—a cage of conductive material that shields computer equipment from static electricity—Reynier extrapolated its form to the exterior of the building. He chose to clad the structure with reflective metal panels that recall the box and also, like the canal, reflect the trees and existing architecture.

Meanwhile, Bertholon found a local manufacturer of polished steel panels that fit the design perfectly. “It was one of the only industries left in the town,” says Seher. Not only did the decision cut materials shipping costs, it also fit with Seher’s urban-focused concept of using the structure to signal a return to the city’s industrial roots, which date back 400 years.

“We said to the mayor, ‘We want to do something with your material—this is your identity,’ ” says Seher. “And we were able to create an example of local industry through a multiplied approach, mixing architecture, engineering, and social considerations.”

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Cadaval & Solà-Morales

Cadaval & Solà-Morales moves easily between multiple cultures.

By David Cohn

Since launching their firm in 2003, Eduardo Cadaval and Clara Solà-Morales have honed an eye for detail, color, and texture while developing an approach to spatial issues that balances adventure with simplicity. Their work brings together in a single vision the experience and cultures of three different countries: Mexico, where Cadaval was born and studied; Spain, or more specifically Barcelona, where Solà-Morales, daughter of the late architectural historian and critic Ignasi Solà-Morales, was raised and studied; and the United States, where the couple met at Harvard and first settled in New York. They now maintain their practice in Barcelona, with a second office in Mexico City.

A beach house in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, displays many of the firm’s salient traits. A vertical assemblage of three concrete boxes, it thrusts up with an open-air viewing space on top of a four-story tower and then out with a bedroom box that cantilevers 16 feet to shade a pool terrace below. With its simple volumes, rough textures, and bright color accents, the design brings to mind a local architectural tradition rooted in the work of Luis Barragán, but also refers to weekend houses of the Costa Brava from the 1950s and those of Long Island from the 1960s and ’70s.

The husband-and-wife team began working in New York as a neutral territory, but decamped to Barcelona with the winning competition design to refurbish the interiors of the Pedralbes Palace, a former royal residence built in the 1920s and now used by the regional government. Confronting rooms that had suffered many reforms over the years, they decided to “strip out the scenography, clean up the spaces, and dress them with a few contemporary details,” says Solà-Morales. The architects have used a similar strategy for their apartment renovations in Barcelona and Madrid. “Our approach is to organize an apartment correctly, discover its potential, and then clean it up and make it livable,” explains Cadaval. “We don’t think it should end up looking like a fashionable restaurant.”

Cadaval and Solà-Morales have found greater freedom in commissions for temporary projects, such as the installation of a show in Madrid dedicated to the sculptor Susana Solàno, in which they used panels made from honeycomb door cores to give an intimate scale to the work. For a wedding in Barcelona’s Botanical Garden, they created a 260-foot-long dining table that snakes beside a reflecting pool, following the triangular geometry of Carlos Ferrater’s 1999 design for the garden.

Solà-Morales says one reason the couple came to Barcelona was for its wealth of competitions and the chance to do public projects, such as their proposal for a library in the medieval coastal town of Llança. But so far their practice has thrived mainly on small private commissions, as would have been the case in New York. Cadaval explains that the firm aims for designs “that are avant-garde today, but will also be avant-garde in 15 years.” He adds, “If you look back at the excesses of the Modern movement, or Postmodernism, the most important works remain because they didn’t resort to easy tricks. They’re solid.”

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Daniel Bonilla Arquitectos

Daniel Bonilla looks at architecture with an eye for urban design.

By Beth Broome

Though he knew no one in the field or even that a formal discipline existed, Daniel Bonilla made the decision to become an architect when he was nine years old. “I loved modern architecture and had a keen interest in what was new,” says Bonilla who, as a young boy, turned to pictures of buildings in books and magazines for his drawing models. “I’m still very keen on understanding what the world is today. I’m still more interested in what is new.” Because he traveled very little as a child, his inspiration came from his hometown of Bogotá, Colombia, where in high school he drew buildings on-site as a way of observing and understanding the city. “I started to develop a concern that is important to my work today: how buildings change and affect society,” he says.

While studying in Bogotá’s Los Andes University’s architecture program, Bonilla expanded his worldview during a semester abroad in Dublin. “I came back to Colombia and decided to watch cities,” he says. A job in Bogotá’s mayor’s office led to a master’s degree in urban design in Great Britain and then a position at a London urban-planning consultancy. Back in Bogotá, he landed a job in the urban-planning arm of a large development firm but soon became frustrated by the work’s slow pace and long gestation periods, so he transitioned to direct the company’s architecture-and-design branch. In 1997, at the height of the county’s recession, and on the day his second daughter was born, the firm closed its design department, leaving Bonilla jobless. Bolstered by a couple of small projects he carried away with him, Bonilla, with his wife, Marcela Albornoz, as a partner, hung out his shingle. His timing was fortuitous. A few years earlier, the country had instituted a mandatory competition initiative for government construction, and the program was growing rapidly. “I built my practice on these competitions,” says Bonilla. In his first year out, he won the commission for Colombia’s national pavilion for the World’s Fair in Hanover, Germany, a project that earned the architect a high degree of recognition.

Though Bonilla’s focus has shifted back to architecture, his urban design experience continues to inspire him. “Over the years, I developed a view of architecture that involved thinking first not about what is going to be built, but about how the building will relate to, help articulate, and enhance the city. I learned to think first of the city,” he says. With this in mind, he has been experimenting with dissolving the boundaries of his buildings (a challenge in a country where security has been such an important issue). His work also investigates the idea of flexibility or mutability and explores how building envelopes can redefine the relationship between inside and out by functioning as tissues or textures rather than a series of walls and windows.

Bonilla’s work departs from what is commonly understood as traditional Colombian architecture, which employs an extensive use of brick. “It is possible to do work that follows traditions, but interprets them in a contemporary way, creating new traditions,” he says, adding that he sees this as his duty as a young architect. Bonilla believes that a conservative approach can isolate a culture from the increasingly globalized world and keep it a second-class citizen on the international architecture scene. “Latin America is growing up,” he says, “and there is a lot of opportunity to have a big impact. You feel alive here—like you are contributing to society.”

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Gianni Botsford

Gianni Botsford develops high-tech tools to make buildings for people.

By Linda C. Lentz

Gianni Botsford is an architect who thinks from the inside out. This is not surprising, as Botsford, principal of the London-based Gianni Botsford Architects (GBA), studied and practiced interior design before pursuing architecture. “It’s a good starting point,” he says, referring to the enduring effects of this initial training. “In any building we do, we decide on the position based on what it needs to do inside, not what it’s going to look like outside. We put a window where you need one. That creates a facade eventually.” Or, as was the case in the firm’s first built work 10 years ago, it is the basis for the lack of one.

This commission came shortly after Botsford graduated from London’s Architecture Association (AA). At the AA, he studied under John Frazier, a pioneer in the use of computers in architecture, and developed software and solar geometry techniques that optimize a structure for criteria such as context, heat gain, weather resistance, daylight, and lifestyle. It was this work, coupled with his unique inverse perspective, that led an academic couple to hire him to design their home in Notting Hill, London, on a backland property—an infill site at the core of a block, surrounded by other buildings, hidden among houses, a church, and studio buildings, and accessible only through a discrete archway.

The key challenge, recalls Botsford, was to maintain privacy while providing daylight for a house constrained by the proximity of neighboring buildings and city strictures. “First we analyzed and visualized the site in three dimensions with environmental software,” he explains. “This process was slow, but the key thing was we didn’t start designing any aspects of the house until we had understood the site properly. We then had rational reasons for the decisions we made.” As a result, the Light House, as it’s called, was given an all-glass roof, with internal terraces and gardens open to the sky to provide ventilation and light. There are no windows around the perimeter of the concrete structure. Living spaces are on the top floor, which has 20-foot-high ceilings to catch winter light, and bedrooms are on the ground floor. Moreover, adds Botsford, while the house resides in a preservation area, “Because we were hidden, we had the opportunity to be more ambitious in the form and materials we used.”

Botsford continues to fine-tune his thesis, often working with Arup to broaden the possibilities for larger, more complex, and global work. Casa Kiké, an award-winning writer’s retreat in Costa Rica, was designed using such advanced computational analysis. Made with local building materials and methods, it was configured as two short pavilions with pitched, overhanging roofs for natural airflow and shading and to benefit from ocean and jungle views. Its success has elicited a growing list of invitations. Most recently, GBA was asked to produce a protoype sales center for a Gulf-based developer, create a daylit garden house in Notting Hill, and participate in a workshop to develop a 50-acre “Design Zone” in Qatar.

According to Botsford, his practice is ready to expand even more. He affirms, however, that his work will remain consistent in its approach to local climate, culture, and context. “It’s about treating each site individually, not coming with a predetermined approach to the project, and being open to the possibilities of that site, that context, and that problem.”

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Kuehn Malvezzi

Kuehn Malvezzi finds the art in making more with less.

By Leslie Yudell

When the architects at Kuehn Malvezzi put on a show, they don’t make a spectacle of themselves. The Berlin-based firm—founded in 2001 by German brothers Wilfried and Johannes Kuehn, and an Italian, Simona Malvezzi—has gained a reputation for deft, elegant art installations that focus not just on the display of objects but on the encounter between artworks and viewers that informs it. To shape this exchange, the team concentrates on modeling space, not crafting enclosures. “We design from the inside out, not the outside in,” Wilfried Kuehn notes. “It’s not about ‘big’ architecture,” he adds, or projecting a signature style, but establishing connections between things by the simplest, unmediated means.

The team works closely with artists and curators on exhibition projects. In 2002, they won a competition to convert a 64,600-square-foot former brewery building into an exhibition venue for the Documenta 11 art show in Kassel, Germany. The winning scheme successfully addressed the curatorial vision of Okwui Enwezor, the director of the show—which embraced diverse cultures and broad political and social themes—as “constellations” of individual artists’ works, not juxtapositions of single works by different artists. The architects configured the huge interior as a matrix of flexible, varied-size spaces, planned like a city, which gave visitors a choice of routes through the galleries: either “en suite,” as in a maze, or by “shortcuts,” targeting particular installations. To keep access to all the galleries open, the team devised an acoustical barrier embedded in the walls that allowed audible works to be placed near silent ones without closing off any areas.

Following its success at Kassel, the firm won the competition for an extension of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum, to exhibit, over seven years, the private Friedrich Christian Flick Collection of contemporary art. The annex, comprising eight linked galleries within a two-story former freight warehouse behind the museum, opened in 2004. Entered from the main building via a concrete bridge, the extension’s original steel and redbrick structure was covered with new, corrugated-metal cladding enclosing a former loading ramp, now an interior corridor. Although the building opened amid controversy over the role of the Flick family in World War II, it has been so well received that the plan to raze it for residential and office development is being reviewed; it may spawn a new art district instead.

Wilfried Kuehn and Malvezzi’s training in Italy focused on the study of architectural typologies as a basis for invention, and the firm’s work reflects a keen awareness of historic precedents. The Kuehn brothers also studied in Portugal, where the emphasis was on the impact of context on design. Like the team’s later projects, an early scheme for the entrance pavilion of a theater festival combines both approaches. Instead of a separate structure, they appended a staircase swathed in red carpet to the facade of the main theater, using its upper-level ballroom, usually inaccessible to the public, as the festival entrance hall. The scheme democratized the Baroque staircase, associated with privilege, by moving it to the street as open access to the building’s private quarters and as bleachers overlooking the city. On display like a public artwork visible from afar, it also served as an apt logo for the event, linking it to the town’s historic center.

[eaGer]

MOS

MOS brings intensity and wry humor to its work on many scales.

By Anya Kaplan-Seem

When Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample started working together, they made 「a lot of furniture-scaled things, a lot of weird experiments, and a lot of carpets,」 says Meredith. Without clients, budgets, or a firm, they had only abundant energy and a sense of shared purpose. 「We just like making things,」 says Meredith. 「It's not that sophisticated, always.」

The pure intensity of the couple's enthusiasm for design may not be sophisticated, but since launching MOS in 2003, Meredith and Sample, who are married, have produced work that certainly is. Describing MOS (spelled out m-o-s, or pronounced 「moss」) as 「rhizomic,」 they contrast their firm's method of unhierarchical and expansive exploration to the 「heroic architectural model of the architect versus the world.」 As Sample explains, 「We work with the system instead of trying to import an entirely new one a priori to the site.」 This considered approach to environment, joined with the pair's sense of humor and desire to experiment with texture and type, has yielded consistently surprising and engaging results.

One early project offers an eloquent example of MOS's specifics-based approach. In 2004, the firm created a puppet theater in the courtyard of Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center at Harvard for the building's 40th anniversary. Bobbing beneath the center's concrete mass like a polycarbonate fish, the theater acts as a telescope: At one end, it narrows to frame a view alternately of the building's entrance or the puppet stage; at the other, it opens to a view of a single tree. In a playful gesture that also yields a wordplay, MOS covered the exterior of the structure with moss.

As befits a firm with projects of this scale and eccentricity, MOS calls itself 「un-corporate.」 Yet its chosen epithet is less a reflection of the firm's projects than of its attitude. 「We have fun,」 says Meredith. 「I mean, design should be fun, otherwise we shouldn't be doing it.」

As MOS has expanded, its principals have successfully maintained an experimental atmosphere, thanks largely to their academic careers. For Meredith and Sample, who are associate professors at Harvard and Yale, respectively, teaching has been an important enabler, allowing them to pass up what Sample calls 「bread and butter」 work in preference for projects that pique their interest.

Despite rarely working with the same type twice, Meredith and Sample frequently revisit a core set of themes. For a current project, the Arts Archipelago, Drive-in, and Park in Marfa, Texas, MOS is again reconsidering, through materials and form, a specific vernacular—here, the drive-in. And as with many of its projects, the firm's focus will be on an object in the landscape—in this case, a combined band shell and theater screen. But whereas in past projects 「the objects always had to go into an environment that we really couldn't touch,」 says Meredith, this job will allow MOS, for the first time, to construct 「the environment as much as the object.」 Seeking as ever to be 「critical, intimate, sneaky, clever, and inventive,」 Meredith and Sample are bringing their usual blend of careful study and playful experimentation to bear on a new subject: the landscape.

[eaGer]

Smiljan Radic

Smiljan Radic creates works inspired by the ancients, and the everyday.

By Josephine Minutillo

Smiljan Radic's family has been rooted in Chile for generations, even if his Croatian name suggests he is a newcomer to its remote terrain. A similar dichotomy manifests in the architect's built work, almost all of which lies within the borders of this impossibly thin strip of coastland stretching nearly 3,000 miles behind the majestic Andes. While it appears that the hand of an outsider is at play, Radic's alien forms also indicate the keen eye of a native who masterfully translates local phenomena into new and unexpected experiences.

Take his art installation in Culiprán, just west of Santiago. After coming across an abandoned, dome-shaped hut used for making charcoal—an uncommon sight in Chile these days—Radic decided to reinterpret the hut's form employing its very unique construction method, which involves burning sticks and mud to make the walls. 「We found the man who had built it,」 Radic recalls. 「He was almost 90 years old at the time, but we wanted to understand how to make these things that aren't done anymore.」

For a residence outside of Talca, a couple of hours drive south of the capital, Radic drew inspiration from the region's simple houses, mimicking the strange geometry of their sagging roofs and the deep shadow lines they create. But rather than employing wood and weighty ceramic roof tiles, Radic chose another locally produced, if surprising, material—cladding the sloping roof and exterior walls of his house in an electrolytic copper, the first architectural use in Chile of this particular form of the metal.

In another house, Radic transformed the existing structure of a familiar countryside cabin into the dramatic centerpiece of a landscape art installation. Atop the steep gable roof, Radic placed a widow's walk, using it to take in the views of the surrounding Cordillera Mountains. Adjacent to the house, he designed a Stonehenge-like assembly with the sculptress Marcela Correa, a frequent collaborator.

A similar installation of boulders, also created with Correa, serves as an entrance platform for yet another house. The ghosts of antiquity infuse this project: Tall, solitary rocks convey the look of ruins, while the raw concrete structure's dramatic siting on a promontory overlooking the water recalls the spectacular stone theaters of Classical Greece.

Radic cemented his ties to the ancient world early in his career, after winning a competition in Crete and living for a period in Greece and in Italy. A pavilionlike restaurant inside a park in Santiago reveals his most explicit reference to antiquity. There, Radic again uses boulders, but this time the giant pieces of granite act as columns supporting the roof. 「I was inspired by a drawing by Jacques-François Blondel that depicts these beautiful caryatids burdened by the heavy weight they carry,」 explains Radic.

Strangely enough, unlike many of his peers, Radic is not eager to work outside his own country. 「I understand that architects want to build all over the world,」 Radic says. 「But to me, it's all about what you can learn.」 For a recent project, he collaborated with structural engineers in Germany. 「That was much more of a global project because I learned so much and was able to do something in Chile, for Chile.」

[eaGer]

Suppose Design Office

非學院派

Makoto Tanijiri (谷尻誠)並非出自名校，也沒有著名事務所的工作經歷。他在日本的technical college讀過兩年，並愉快地承認在此期間自己從未看過任何一本書。在當地一家事務所工作五年後，26歲的他成立了Suppose Design Office。

設計新人

Makoto Tanijiri (谷尻誠)和日本大部分年輕的建築設計師一樣，他做的大多是住宅和室內設計，不過現在他也逐步參與到更大的建築設計案中。鑑於進行中的30多個設計案地域縱跨半個日本，谷尻誠亦考慮在東京設立事務所分支（這對目前還擁擠在廣島25平方米公寓裡工作的10多位Suppose Design Office成員來說都是幸事啦！）。

Makoto Tanijiri (谷尻誠)works outside Japan’s usual web of relationships.

By Naomi R. Pollock, AIA

Given the opportunity for a solo show in central Tokyo, most young architects would put their buildings on display. But Makoto Tanijiri, who founded the Hiroshima firm Suppose Design Office, is not like most architects. Instead of featuring stand-alone works, his recent exhibition, Tokyo Office, at the Prismic Gallery, displayed an entire work space. Desks, chairs, and a computer took the place of frames and pedestals, while concept sketches casually taped to the wall, binders of working drawings, study models, and other tools of the trade were as artfully arranged as a still-life painting.

The pristine presentation bears little resemblance to Tanijiri’s actual headquarters: a 270-square-foot studio apartment where his staff of 10 hunker down amid a maze of desks, model parts, and material samples. One of Hiroshima’s growing number of successful young practitioners, Tanijiri has completed a slew of projects, including an internal medicine clinic, a wedding chapel, a variety of commercial interiors, and a whopping 44 houses—not bad for a guy who admits he goofed off in school. Instead of entering a prestigious university followed by an apprenticeship with a well-known designer, Tanijiri attended a two-year technical college, then worked for a design-build firm where he picked up construction basics and enough training to qualify for his license. After five years, the 26-year-old architect left the company to launch his own venture in 2000. He spent his first year on his own competing in mountain-bike races while designing small interiors for friends on the side.

By his second year, bona fide building commissions started to roll in. But the media did not take notice until 2003, when Tanijiri completed Float, a combined restaurant and residence in a Hiroshima suburb. What garnered attention were the giant, triangulated steel frames Tanijiri used to straddle his client’s challenging, split-level site. “If you think positively about a difficult problem, you will find a way to solve it,” explains the architect.

Perhaps Tanijiri’s willingness to take on jobs that might make others shudder stems from his unorthodox training. Free from the overbearing influence of the strong mentor relationships that typically develop in Japanese universities and design offices, Tanijiri has a broad vision and writes his own rules. He does not favor any particular formal, structural, or material solutions—all are fair game. “Strong initial ideas yield strong buildings.” They result in good exhibitions, too. While the relaxed informality of Tokyo Office captured Tanijiri’s easygoing demeanor, its practical content projected his no-nonsense approach to problem solving. Poised to open a Tokyo branch office the day after the exhibition closed, Tanijiri planned simply to ship the contents of the show to the newly leased space where the displayed objects would revert to design tools, and drawings would turn back into reference materials.

[eaGer]

Urban A&O

Urban A&O deploys digital dexterity to define space and sculpt form.

By Joann Gonchar, AIA

Like many young and technologically savvy architectural practices, New York City–based Urban A&O relies on tools such as the design software CATIA and digital fabrication processes to produce sculptural and geometrically complex objects and environments. “But we are not slaves to technology,” says Joe MacDonald, founder and principal of the six-year-old firm. “Our agenda is to create public spaces and new forms that people can interact with.”

These aspirations are vividly illustrated by the Water Planet, which is one component of Renzo Piano’s recently opened California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Here, A&O, in collaboration with exhibition design firm Thinc, created a permanent multimedia installation that explores the relationship between water and life. Wavelike walls wrap aquarium tanks, and fluidly shaped “islands” combine live animals with interactive displays. Folds in these sensuous surfaces provide handrails and benches. “They are examples of form soliciting touch,” says MacDonald.

A&O’s commissions haven’t always been as high-profile as the $20 million Water Planet. “We started out essentially doing product design,” says MacDonald, whose portfolio includes furniture and smaller exhibits. But whatever the scale, A&O’s work always involves what he refers to as “parametric research.” Projects like the Bone Wall are clearly the product of such investigations. Exhibited at New York City’s Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2006, the 6-foot-tall, 14-foot-long undulating screen was composed of 72 rotated and stretched parametrically linked cells. “I’m curious how far a pattern can be manipulated and still be recognized.”

The firm is also exploring pattern in the medium of landscape. It has just submitted a design proposal for a riverside park in Jacksonville, Florida. A&O’s scheme, inspired by riptides, superimposes two sets of curvy ridges to form a series of outdoor rooms on the 13-acre site.

MacDonald’s interest in landscape is long-standing. Between 1994 and 1996, after graduate school at Harvard University (where he now teaches), he worked for landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. And even while a student, he often represented his projects with topographical drawings, rather than with conventional plans and sections.

Landscape is also an important element in A&O’s first freestanding building—a 25,000-square-foot exhibition pavilion for Johnson & Johnson at the Beijing Olympic Games. Outside the fritted-glass-enclosed structure, a water garden and bamboo grove create a lush, green oasis. The architects also brought the bamboo inside, helping to connect the pavilion with its grounds and a garden on the roof.

MacDonald hopes that A&O will someday have the opportunity to design a skyscraper, although he is not particular about whether it is a residential building or an office tower. “I’m interested in verticality and geometry rather than program,” he says. But his preoccupation with the building type is not purely formal. He would want the tower to be environmentally responsible as well. “My goal would be to explore sustainability in a vertical situation.”