Le Corbusier: Art and Architecture
A Life of Creativity
Mori Art Museum
Tokyo, Japan

“Part of every day of my life has been devoted to drawing. I have never stopped drawing and painting, looking wherever I could for the secrets of form. You don’t have to look any further than this for the key to my work and research....”
Le Corbusier

Photo © FLC
Red Violin (1920)
Oil on canvas

The exhibition is on view through September 24, 2007

Architectural giant, the founder of modernism, the greatest architect of the 20th Century - just some of the accolades that have been attached to Swiss born Frenchman Le Corbusier (1887-1965). It is little known that Le Corbusier devoted his mornings to painting and sculpture; architecture only started in the afternoons when he went to his office.

Photo: Watanabe Osamu courtesy Mori Art Museum

The exhibition examines Le Corbusier the man, revealing the individual behind the facade in a comprehensive presentation of about 250 paintings, furniture and architectural artifacts.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is a number of full-scale reproductions of architectural spaces, starting with a walk-in model of his atelier in Paris, complete with furniture and other personal trappings.

Photo: Watanabe Osamu courtesy Mori Art Museum
Atelier Reproduction

A full-size reproduction of a two-story apartment from his “Unité d'Habitation” (1945-52) in Marseilles give visitor a chance to experience Corbusier’s creations først hand.

Photo: Watanabe Osamu courtesy Mori Art Museum
Unité d'Habitation, Marseille Reproduction

Photo: Watanabe Osamu courtesy Mori Art Museum
Unité d'Habitation, Marseille Reproduction

Le Corbusier's architecture is of course known and loved worldwide - a constant point of reference and discussion, and never far from the minds of even contemporary architects.

Here Le Corbusier's major architectural and urban planning works are exhibited in drawings, models, photographs, and videos, in accordance with the principles that guided them.

Among the many projects are Notre-Dame-du-Haut (1950-55) in Ronchamp, France and The Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette (1953-60) in Eveux, France.
arcspace visited La Tourette in 2001 and send a message, with many photos, to all our readers asking for help with the renovation La Tourette is currently undergoing.

Photo: arcspace

In 1928 Le Corbusier worked on the Minimum Automobile “Maximum” project aimed towards creating a vehicle of maximum efficiency. This design streamlined the body of the automobile and maximized its utility.

Photo: Watanabe Osamu courtesy Mori Art Museum

Le Corbusier died in 1965 never returning to his beloved cottage “Le Petite Cabanon,” in Cap Martin in the South of France, after a morning swim.
There is also a full scale reproduction of the cottage in the exhibition.

Photo courtesy Cassina S.p.A.
Reproduction (1952-2006 ) CASSINA S.p.A.

“The buildings created by le Corbusier around the world today stand as witnesses to his artistic intelligence. Beyond the man who built them, they now belong to the history of modern art and architecture. They also represent a living heritage.”
Jean-Pierre Duport
President of the Le Corbusier Foundation

The Plans of Le Corbusier are documented on a series of DVDs published in cooperation with the Fondation Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier
and the Continual Revolution in Architecture
By Charles Jencks

Because of severe restrictions we were not allowed to photograph in the exhibition. Instead we give you a photo looking out from the “Tokyo City View” platform two floors below the museum.

Vision of Space: Antonio Gaudi - God's Architect
English | Subtitle: none | 0:59:17 | 520x360 | PAL (25fps) | DivX 5.03 | Audio: MP3 - 135kbps | 622 MB

Gaudi was an intensely Catholic celibate who, despite his austere life, created some of the most sensuous buildings ever known.

Robert Hughes returns to Spain to explore the legacy of Antoni Gaudi, the last great cathedral builder of the 20th century.
Gaudi was an intensely Catholic celibate who, despite his austere life, created some of the most sensuous buildings ever known. On his journey through Gaudi's life and work, Hughes (an ex-Catholic himself) explains how a man as religious and conservative as Gaudi could become such an innovative 20th-century giant.

1 part http://rapidshare.com/files/47972701/VoS_-_AG.part01.rar
2 part http://rapidshare.com/files/48079532/VoS_-_AG.part02.rar
3 part http://rapidshare.com/files/48087863/VoS_-_AG.part03.rart
4 part http://rapidshare.com/files/48111916/VoS_-_AG.part04.rar
5 part http://rapidshare.com/files/48132245/VoS_-_AG.part05.rar
6 part http://rapidshare.com/files/48168893/VoS_-_AG.part06.rar
7 part http://rapidshare.com/files/48179307/VoS_-_AG.part07.rar
8 part http://rapidshare.com/files/48205005/VoS_-_AG.part08.rar
9 part http://rapidshare.com/files/48303823/VoS_-_AG.part09.rar
10 part http://rapidshare.com/files/48215091/VoS_-_AG.part10.rar

Modern airports, shopping centres, bridges and train stations are complex buildings with a high frequency of pedestrians. People must be able to move inside these buildings without disturbances and with comfort, and it is crucial that in emergency cases people can be evacuated safely and in time. Pedestrian jams caused by unknown bottlenecks are disastrous if seconds decide over life and death.

For nearly 30 years, ETABS has been recognized as the industry standard for Building Analysis and Design Software. Today, continuing in the same tradition, ETABS has evolved into a completely Integrated Building Analysis and Design Environment. The System built around a physical object based graphical user interface, powered by targeted new special purpose algorithms for analysis and design, with interfaces for drafting and manufacturing, is redefining standards of integration, productivity and technical innovation.

BBC - Frank Lloyd Wright: Murder, Myth, and Modernism
XviD MPEG-4 codec - 1381 KB/s | English | 624 x 368 | 25 FPS | 1.69:1 | 2 Ch, MP3 128 KB/s | 639.74 MB

The American icon behind the Guggenheim museum, Fallingwater and his own home, Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright became the greatest architect of the 20th century - not only because of his magnificent talent but because he was a master showman and self-publicist.

The sheer scale of Lloyd Wright's career – over 450 buildings in 70 years – is astonishing in itself but there is much more to his story than the romantic myth his autobiography revealed.

This new documentary, accompanying the BBC TWO series Marvels Of The Modern Age, explores Lloyd Wright's visionary works and reveals how his life was beset with periods of devastating critical derision, financial chaos, scandal, and a violent but little-known murder.

On 15 August 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright was at his office in Chicago. 140 miles away, at their home in Wisconsin, his mistress, Mamah Borthwick-Cheney, sat down to lunch with her two children. In another room were six of Wright’s staff – tradesmen and studio workers. After serving the meals, Wright’s servant, Julian Carleton, quietly bolted the doors and windows, poured gasoline around the outside of the house, and set it alight.

As the house began to burn, he took a hatchet and attacked and murdered Mamah and her children – she was killed where she sat. He then went after the workmen. Herbert Fritz and Billy Weston escaped by smashing through a window. They were the only survivors that day. At his office, Wright received a phone call telling him only that there had been a fire but when he arrived at the train station he learned the full story from waiting reporters.

The brutal murders were the final tragic act in a story of adultery and intrigue that had scandalised polite society for the previous five years. Wright was grief-stricken but refused to be defeated – he vowed to rebuild Taliesin. This is the story of how Wright rebuilt his life and reputation on the site of his greatest tragedy, the house that he called ‘Taliesin’. Wright’s own account of his life is notoriously unreliable, but he revealed himself most clearly in the houses he built, and most of all in Taliesin.

If the Guggenheim is his epitaph, this is his biography. For half a century, Taliesin’s changing fortunes followed Wright’s own and it ultimately inspired the act of creative genius that justified Frank Lloyd Wright’s assessment of himself as “the world’s greatest architect”.

A World of Wonder production.


http://rapidshare.com/files/74734507/BBC.Frank.Lloyd.Wright.Murder_Myth.and.Modernism.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/74735184/BBC.Frank.Lloyd.Wright.Murder_Myth.and.Modernism.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/74735874/BBC.Frank.Lloyd.Wright.Murder_Myth.and.Modernism.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/74736633/BBC.Frank.Lloyd.Wright.Murder_Myth.and.Modernism.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/74737354/BBC.Frank.Lloyd.Wright.Murder_Myth.and.Modernism.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/74738186/BBC.Frank.Lloyd.Wright.Murder_Myth.and.Modernism.part6.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/74738439/BBC.Frank.Lloyd.Wright.Murder_Myth.and.Modernism.part7.rar

FORMERLY KNOWN AS UCFYBER, XTRACT FEATURES a fully interactive program for the analysis of structural cross sections.

Rhvac quickly and accurately calculates peak heating and cooling loads for residential and small commercial buildings in accordance with the eighth edition of the ACCA Manual J. The Heat Transfer Multipliers (HTM values) for all the walls, windows, doors, and roofs listed in Manual J are stored and automatically looked up by the program as needed. Although HTM values are taken from Manual J directly, the user does have the option of entering his own U-Value for each wall, roof, or glass section so that a modified HTM value is used. Design weather data for over 1500 cities is built-in to the program. In addition, the user can revise the existing weather data and add additional weather data as desired. Zoning cfm adjustments are automatically handled by the program as needed. Other outstanding features include exterior glass shading, ventilation air, miscellaneous latent loads, default room data, automatic rotation of the entire building, hydronic heat calculations and much more.

GRAPHICAL INPUT OF PROJECTS
A project geometry is modelled using a top view approach. The input of soil data, structures, construction stages, loads and boundary conditions is based on convenient CAD drawing procedures, which allows for a detailed and accurate modelling of the major geometry. From this geometry a 3D finite element mesh is generated.
BORE HOLES
Soil layers are defined by means of bore holes. Multiple bore holes can be placed in the geometry to define a non-horizontal soil stratigraphy or an inclined ground surface. Plaxis automatically interpolates layer and ground surface positions in between the bore holes.

Who uses ECOTECT? ECOTECT is designed and written by architects and primarily intended for architects – although the software is used extensively by engineers, local authorities, environmental consultants and building designers, as well as owner-builders and environmental enthusiasts alike. To see how other people are using it, see the Gallery or the Example Output pages. Energy efficiency is now an achieveable goal for all designers.

The RAM Structural System was developed with one primary goal in mind… to help structural engineers increase their productivity so that they can produce better designs, faster. By providing powerful tools that are automated, integrated, and a complete alternative to traditional design methods, the RAM Structural System has accomplished this goal.

RISA-3D is so popular among structural engineers for many reasons but one in particular stands out: ease of use. We designed our premier product with the daily use of structural engineering professionals in mind.

www.risatech.com

STAAD Pro is the professional’s choice for steel, concrete, timber, aluminum and cold-formed steel design of low and high-rise buildings, culverts, petrochemical plants, tunnels, bridges, piles and much more! A comprehensive and integrated finite element analysis and design solution, including a state-of-the-art user interface, visualization tools, and international design codes. Capable of analyzing any structure exposed to a dynamic response, soil-structure interaction, or wind, earthquake, and moving loads.

Architecture Software

Advance Concrete was specifically developed for structural engineers and detailers seeking a simple to use and completely integrated package in AutoCAD to create all their construction drawings.Perfectly integrated into AutoCAD, Advance Concrete significantly accelerates the initial design phase of buildings by offering detailers and engineers a library of drag and drop structural elements (slabs, beams, columns, walls, foundations), openings (doors, windows, depressions, openings, niches), bars (straight bars, point bars, frames, pin bars, stirrups), materials and standard sections.

On the morning of 11 September 2001, terrorists targeted the World Trade Center in Manhattan, first crashing a hijacked commercial jetliner into the upper levels of One World Trade Center, one of its twin 110-story iconic skyscrapers. A few minutes later a second hijacked aircraft sliced through the middle levels of Two World Trade Center, the other tower. (A third airliner crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., while a fourth crash landed in a field in Pennsylvania, its intended target undetermined.) The effects were predictably devastating: both buildings burned fiercely before totally collapsing in clouds of dust and rubble that darkened the sky above Manhattan. A third building in the complex, a forty-seven-story office block (Seven World Trade Center), damaged by flying debris, followed soon after.
In an earlier raid in February 1993 Arab terrorists exploded a 1,200-pound (550-kilogram) truck bomb in the Center’s parking garage, creating a 150-foot diameter (46-meter) crater. Six people died, and over 1,000 were injured. Floors were destroyed for three levels below the point of detonation, but because of the load-bearing exterior walls, the structural stability of the building was largely unaffected. Tenants returned to their offices by the end of March. The cost of repairs was $250 million. The World Trade Center occupied a 16-acre (6.5 hectare) site a few blocks from Wall Street at the southwestern tip of Manhattan Island, near the bank of the Hudson River. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki and Associates and supervised by Emery Roth and Sons, it was the core of an urban renewal scheme sponsored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to attract international firms to downtown Manhattan.
The surviving parts of the complex are a twenty-two story, 818-room hotel (Three World Trade Center); two nine-story office buildings (Four and Five World Trade Center); and an eight-story Customs House (Six World Trade Center). With the destroyed buildings, they were grouped around the 5-acre (2 hectare) landscaped Austin J. Tobin Plaza. Beneath it is The Mall, with about sixty specialty shops, banks, restaurants, and function spaces. Before the tragedy, about 500 international companies were located in the center, employing 50,000 people. It had its own subway stations and its own zip code. In March 1999 U.S. construction executives named the World Trade Center among the top ten construction achievements of the twentieth century.
For a short while the One and Two World Trade Center towers, at around 1,353 feet (411 meters), were the world’s tallest buildings, but they were superseded in 1974 by the 1,442-foot (450-meter) Sears Tower in Chicago. In 1998 the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, reached 1,483 feet (452 meters). Even higher buildings have been projected: for example, the Taipei Financial Center, to be completed in August 2002, will stand 1,660 feet (508 meters) tall and Hong Kong’s Kowloon MTR Tower will be 1,903 feet (580 meters). As technically demanding as it is, great height does not qualify a building as an architectural feat. It was their structural system and the consequent creation of usable space that made the New York World Trade Center’s towers remarkable. Ironically, it also was a contributor to their collapse.
Yamasaki’s team was selected over a dozen other American architects. During the preliminary design phase, more than 100 proposals were reviewed, ranging from a single 150-story tower (its scale was far too large) to a series of lower towers (which “looked too much like a housing project”). Following Yamasaki’s recommendation, the Port Authority decided on the twin towers as the focus for the complex. The final plan was produced, subject to some minor changes, in 1964 and construction began in 1966. The project, administered by the Tishman Realty and Construction Co., entailed over 700 contracts.
The site was first isolated by building a 3-foot (0.9-meter) thick, 70-foot-high (21.5-meter) wall, keyed into the bedrock. A six-level basement was built in the foundation excavation, and the spoil was used to create over 23 acres (9.3 hectares) of new land in adjacent Battery Park. The towers, each 208 feet (63.6 meters) square in plan, started to rise in March 1969.
The structural engineering firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson designed the world’s highest load-bearing walls as vertical cantilevered steel tubes. Fourteen-inch square (0.36-meter), aluminum-clad box columns at 39-inch (1-meter) centers around the perimeter of the towers had spandrels welded to them at each floor, effectively making them into huge trusses. The facades were in effect steel lattices, a light, economical structure that provided efficient wind bracing at the outside surface of the building. Less than a third of the towers’ surface area was glass; the slot-like windows were narrower than the columns between them. Thirty-three-inch- deep (0.84-meter) prefabricated steel trusses, spanning 60 feet (18.4 meters) to the towers’ central service cores, carried the floors. Installation of 200,000 structural steel components—they were prefabricated in Seattle, St. Louis, and Los Angeles—presented a major logistical problem, because of the tight urban building site. Delivery and fixing was managed by a computer-programed control system, and eight “kangaroo” cranes built in Australia were used to hoist the elements into place.
The towers’ interiors were column-free, providing 4.48 million square feet (418,600 square meters) of net rentable space—about 75 percent of the total area (the average for contemporary high-rise buildings in the U.S. was only two-thirds of that). The vertical transportation system, which required fewer elevator shafts, also contributed to that efficiency. Each tower had ninety-nine elevators grouped in three vertical “zones”. Express elevators served skylobbies at the forty-first and seventy-fourth floors; from the skylobbies and the plaza, four banks of local elevators carried passengers to each zone.
The World Trade Center complex opened in December 1970 and was dedicated in April 1973. During the course of construction the cost rose from the estimated $350 million to $800 million.
In the September 2001 attack, more than 5,000 people were killed and thousands more were injured. In late September, the last standing piece of the center, a seven-story wall from the south tower, was torn down and saved for possible use in a future memorial. It is unlikely that the elegant towers will rise again.

On the morning of 11 September 2001, terrorists targeted the World Trade Center in Manhattan, first crashing a hijacked commercial jetliner into the upper levels of One World Trade Center, one of its twin 110-story iconic skyscrapers. A few minutes later a second hijacked aircraft sliced through the middle levels of Two World Trade Center, the other tower. (A third airliner crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., while a fourth crash landed in a field in Pennsylvania, its intended target undetermined.) The effects were predictably devastating: both buildings burned fiercely before totally collapsing in clouds of dust and rubble that darkened the sky above Manhattan. A third building in the complex, a forty-seven-story office block (Seven World Trade Center), damaged by flying debris, followed soon after.
In an earlier raid in February 1993 Arab terrorists exploded a 1,200-pound (550-kilogram) truck bomb in the Center’s parking garage, creating a 150-foot diameter (46-meter) crater. Six people died, and over 1,000 were injured. Floors were destroyed for three levels below the point of detonation, but because of the load-bearing exterior walls, the structural stability of the building was largely unaffected. Tenants returned to their offices by the end of March. The cost of repairs was $250 million. The World Trade Center occupied a 16-acre (6.5 hectare) site a few blocks from Wall Street at the southwestern tip of Manhattan Island, near the bank of the Hudson River. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki and Associates and supervised by Emery Roth and Sons, it was the core of an urban renewal scheme sponsored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to attract international firms to downtown Manhattan.
The surviving parts of the complex are a twenty-two story, 818-room hotel (Three World Trade Center); two nine-story office buildings (Four and Five World Trade Center); and an eight-story Customs House (Six World Trade Center). With the destroyed buildings, they were grouped around the 5-acre (2 hectare) landscaped Austin J. Tobin Plaza. Beneath it is The Mall, with about sixty specialty shops, banks, restaurants, and function spaces. Before the tragedy, about 500 international companies were located in the center, employing 50,000 people. It had its own subway stations and its own zip code. In March 1999 U.S. construction executives named the World Trade Center among the top ten construction achievements of the twentieth century.
For a short while the One and Two World Trade Center towers, at around 1,353 feet (411 meters), were the world’s tallest buildings, but they were superseded in 1974 by the 1,442-foot (450-meter) Sears Tower in Chicago. In 1998 the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, reached 1,483 feet (452 meters). Even higher buildings have been projected: for example, the Taipei Financial Center, to be completed in August 2002, will stand 1,660 feet (508 meters) tall and Hong Kong’s Kowloon MTR Tower will be 1,903 feet (580 meters). As technically demanding as it is, great height does not qualify a building as an architectural feat. It was their structural system and the consequent creation of usable space that made the New York World Trade Center’s towers remarkable. Ironically, it also was a contributor to their collapse.
Yamasaki’s team was selected over a dozen other American architects. During the preliminary design phase, more than 100 proposals were reviewed, ranging from a single 150-story tower (its scale was far too large) to a series of lower towers (which “looked too much like a housing project”). Following Yamasaki’s recommendation, the Port Authority decided on the twin towers as the focus for the complex. The final plan was produced, subject to some minor changes, in 1964 and construction began in 1966. The project, administered by the Tishman Realty and Construction Co., entailed over 700 contracts.
The site was first isolated by building a 3-foot (0.9-meter) thick, 70-foot-high (21.5-meter) wall, keyed into the bedrock. A six-level basement was built in the foundation excavation, and the spoil was used to create over 23 acres (9.3 hectares) of new land in adjacent Battery Park. The towers, each 208 feet (63.6 meters) square in plan, started to rise in March 1969.
The structural engineering firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson designed the world’s highest load-bearing walls as vertical cantilevered steel tubes. Fourteen-inch square (0.36-meter), aluminum-clad box columns at 39-inch (1-meter) centers around the perimeter of the towers had spandrels welded to them at each floor, effectively making them into huge trusses. The facades were in effect steel lattices, a light, economical structure that provided efficient wind bracing at the outside surface of the building. Less than a third of the towers’ surface area was glass; the slot-like windows were narrower than the columns between them. Thirty-three-inch- deep (0.84-meter) prefabricated steel trusses, spanning 60 feet (18.4 meters) to the towers’ central service cores, carried the floors. Installation of 200,000 structural steel components—they were prefabricated in Seattle, St. Louis, and Los Angeles—presented a major logistical problem, because of the tight urban building site. Delivery and fixing was managed by a computer-programed control system, and eight “kangaroo” cranes built in Australia were used to hoist the elements into place.
The towers’ interiors were column-free, providing 4.48 million square feet (418,600 square meters) of net rentable space—about 75 percent of the total area (the average for contemporary high-rise buildings in the U.S. was only two-thirds of that). The vertical transportation system, which required fewer elevator shafts, also contributed to that efficiency. Each tower had ninety-nine elevators grouped in three vertical “zones”. Express elevators served skylobbies at the forty-first and seventy-fourth floors; from the skylobbies and the plaza, four banks of local elevators carried passengers to each zone.
The World Trade Center complex opened in December 1970 and was dedicated in April 1973. During the course of construction the cost rose from the estimated $350 million to $800 million.
In the September 2001 attack, more than 5,000 people were killed and thousands more were injured. In late September, the last standing piece of the center, a seven-story wall from the south tower, was torn down and saved for possible use in a future memorial. It is unlikely that the elegant towers will rise again.

A section of bright yellow natural gas pipe commands center stage at the Venice Biennale's International Architecture Exhibition this year. Sixty-three meters long and 1.2 meters in diameter, it snakes down the Castello Gardens from the German to the Russian pavilion.
Gaasitoru/Gas Pipe is the exhibit of Estonia, and draws attention to the controversial project to construct a direct pipeline between Russia and Germany. The pipe would run along the Baltic seabed, which could have major political and ecological implications for neighboring countries.
But the Estonian exhibit also highlights the general issue of energy, which will probably be the biggest single factor in how the architecture of the 21st century develops.
There are 65 national pavilions this year (up 15 from 2006) at the Castello Gardens, Arsenale and other venues around the city. (The exhibition continues until Nov. 23.)
The official overall theme this year is "Out There: Building Beyond Architecture," proposed by Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinatti Art Museum. Betsky has curated the customary signature show of invited architects in the Arsenale's Corderie (Rope Walk). At the entrance we encounter Betsky's vatic statement: "Architecture is not building. Architecture is about building."
Betsky's show consists entirely of post-modernist installations. Visitors new to the exhibition might wonder if they have wandered into the wrong Biennale, and hardened old hands of the visual arts event may experience a sinking sensation of déjà-vû.
However, the national pavilions - which have responded in various ways to Betsky's title - are an absolute feast, enriched by the presence of many bright young contributors as well as talented, independent-thinking veterans, skeptical of modish nostrums.
Japan's charming pavilion was created by the 36-year-old architect Junya Ishigami with the botanist Hideaki Ohba. Ishigami has surrounded the pavilion with diverse, light-as-air greenhouses; Ohba has stocked them and landscaped the site. The interior of the pavilion, apparently all white, on closer inspection turns out to be covered with delicate pencil drawings, envisioning new ways of intergrating housing with nature - a traditional Japanese concern, but here given original, imaginative twists. (The drawings took 20 Japanese students six weeks to execute, working from Ishigami's originals projected onto the walls.) In this space, there are also examples of Ishigami's wafer-thin steel furniture, which belies its sturdiness with an extraordinary impression of weightlessness and near-invisibility.
Fifty years ago, the Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn was in the avant-garde of reconciling building with nature in his design for the Nordic Countries pavilion, which has trees growing through the roof. The pavilion is now the venue for an absorbing retrospective of his career (Fehn is now 84.)
Russia's oil and gas wealth has initiated an uncontrolled boom in building on a grand scale, as local and foreign architects battle it out for lucrative contracts. The Russian pavilion - with a red-and-white checkered floor dotted with moveable trolleys bearing models of edifices already completed, currently under construction or planned for the future - presents this struggle as a "Chess Game for Russia," the outcome of which remains uncertain.
The key question is whether Russia's architectural landscape will be decided by the imported styles of foreign, brand-name architectural practices or local architects, who until recently have had few opportunities to build.
A torrent of words on the subject from interviews with dozens of architects, foreign and Russian (the thoughts of the latter are particularly stimulating), screened in the pavilion and also recorded in three catalogues, clearly demonstrates that this debate has implications far beyond Russia's borders.
The Russian private building boom is taking place in a country where the state still spends little on public infrastructure, and major cities remain linked by dilapidated two-lane roads. Surprisingly, the situation is mirrored somewhat in the United States, where poorer urban and rural areas receive little help from the federal government.
The American pavilion - with the best exhibition it has hosted in years, from which celebrity architects are notably absent - showcases 16 projects from all over the country that illustrate how this absence of the state has fostered a roll-up-your-sleeves, do-it-yourself culture, which is proving fruitful and productive in local architecture.
Projects include a stylish and practical shelter for stray animals in Hale County, Alabama, designed and built with minimal financial resources by eight architectural students; a covered performance space in a San Francisco park, made of 3,000 plastic bottles and roofed with 65 car hoods; and a campaign to preserve for its long-term residents the run-down, historic Third Ward in Houston, which is undergoing gentrification and where nearly 25 traditional wooden houses have mysteriously burned down over the last year.
Housing is a mega issue in Britain, where it is more expensive than anywhere else in Europe apart from Monaco. While the government, which has presided over a decade of unparalleled mass immigration, predicts that millions of new homes will be needed over the next few years, with the current credit crunch, house building has slumped to its lowest rate since World War II. And while the new houses that are being built are on average the smallest in Europe in terms of average room size, of the 10 most expensive houses in Europe, 9 are in Britain.
The architect and writer Ellis Woodman, curator of "Home/Away" at the British pavilion, offers a thought-provoking historical survey of housing in Britain, examining its present ills, and focusing on five national architectural firms that work both at home and in continental Europe, a useful means of comparing the differences of housing cultures. The best-researched and most lucid display at the British pavilion in recent years, the show has already sparked some timely discussion in the British media.
A unique experiment is presented at the Republic of Korea's pavilion. Pajubookcity was dreamed up by a group of communal-minded young idealists in the late 1980s. A thousand sample books and 20 synchronized 50-centimeter, or 20-inch, LCD monitors tell the rather stirring story of this completely new city, built on reclaimed wetlands near the north-south border, which is now the home of 130 publishing companies, 57 printers and binders, and 160 housing units. They now look set to be joined there by the Korean movie industry.
Poland's dystopian vision "The Afterlife of Buildings" won this year's best pavilion prize. It takes six "iconic" contemporary edifices by "star" architects, and imagines by means of Kobas Laksa's brilliant photomontages what they might be like in around 50 years' time.
With soaring fuel costs, terminal 2 at the Warsaw city airport has been turned over to the factory farming of cattle and geese; Norman Foster's "Metropolitan Office Building" has been converted into a ramshackle "Metropolitan Prison," its courtyard a convenient enclosed exercise space for the convicts; and a glittering skyscraper, fallen into decay, has become a vertical cemetery.
Brazil's response to Betsky's title was to banish architects altogether from its pavilion. In "Non-Architects" the organizers present a kaleidoscopic view of São Paolo - through the voices of 50 residents from every level of society - a city where the pace of construction is so frenetic that building suppliers stay open 24 hours a day.
Spain refused to be bamboozled by Betsky. The organizers' riposte has been to declare that they are actually rather proud of some of their present architecture. They have deliberately chosen for this purpose Spanish architects not necessarily well known outside Spain and from the younger generation.
The Spanish message, too, is that some of the more fruitful seams of traditional and modern architecture have by no means been exhausted. As one of the participants, the Catalonian architect Víctor López Cotelo, proposes, the future lies in "combining the rural and the urban, the spontaneous and planned, the natural and the built, the pre-existent and what is to come, so that memory finds its rightful place in the present."

http://www.ontarioarchitecture.com

Biography

Born in Baghdad in 1950,she studied architecture at the Architectural association from 1972, where she was awarded the Diploma Prize in 1977. She then became a member of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, began teaching at the AA with Rem Koohaas and Elia Zengheks; and later lead her own studio at the AA until 1997. Her academic concerns have continued to the present, with periods of visiting professorship at Columbia and Harvard Universiles, and a series of Master Casses and lectures at various venues around the world. During 1994 she held the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design,Harvard University.
Her work was awarded wide international recogniton in 1983, with a winning entry for The Peak Club, Hong Kong, which was folowed by first place awards for competitions in Kurfurstendamm Berlin (1996) for an Art and Media Centre in-Dusseldorf 1989 and for the Cardiff Bay Opera House in 1994.In parallel to her theoretircal and academic work, Hadid began her own practice in 1979 with the design for an Apartment in Eaton place, London. This work was awarded the Architectural Design Gold Medal during 1982. Others projects have included furniture and interors for Bittar, London (1985), and the design of several buildings in Japan including two projects in Tokyo (1988), a Folly In Osaka (1990) and interior work to the Moonsoon restaurant ,Sapporo (1990). In 1990 Hadid also completed an Exhibition Pavilion for video art in Gronningen, and in 1992 she crea ted the instalation for "The great utopia" exhibiton at the Guggenhem Museum New York. During 1988-89 Hadid received thee commission for Vitra fire station in Weil am Rhein, which was completed in 1993. Since 1989 vanous large scale urban studies have also been completed for harbour developments in Hamburg. Bordeaux and Coogne.
Hadid's paintings and drawngs have been shown internationally beginning with a large retrospective at the AA 1983. Other-major exhibitons include Guggenhem Museum, New York (1978) the GA Gallery, Tokyo (1985) the Museum of Modern art in New York (1988). The Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (1994), and The Waiting Room at Grand Central Station New York (1995). Hadid's work also forms part of the permanent collection of various institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, NewYork and the Deutsches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt.

Future eco house
Renewable energy
Future house x2
Future car parking