words Justin McGuirk + Beatrice Galilee + Céline Condorelli + Julian Worrall + Oliver Wainwright + Christine Murray Is it just us or is the young architect a very different beast these days? For the first time, “young” actually means young, but “architect” may no longer mean architect. This is our list of the most significant rising practices. Like all list stories, you’ll disagree with some of it, but that’s half the fun. The first thing to mention is that the “young architect” is definitely younger than he or she used to be. We borrowed the convention of using 40 as our cut-off point, but at least half of the people on this list are 35 or under – and one of them is a 33-year-old overseeing a practice with 75 staff. Have we moved from the architect of promise to the upstart with power? Secondly, the school of thought that architects need to build things to make their presence felt is losing currency. There are a few on this list who reflect that – these are the strategists and networkers who challenge legislation and foment debate. Interestingly, of those who do build, by far the most successful in business terms are the practices who were nurtured by Rem Koolhaas at OMA. Theirs is a world of seismic competition wins and huge staff counts. But where’s all the rebellion? There’s little sense here of a generation reacting against the ideology of its elders – perhaps that’s simply because we live in apolitical times. In fact, there are few signs of a coherent generation at all, although there are definite camps: the Children of Rem, the quiet but extremely sophisticated disciples of Zumthor and SANAA, the tower builders and the open-network activists. This is a global list in more ways than one. You’ll find three Americans, two Japanese, two Chinese, a Chilean, an Indian and a bunch of Europeans. But increasingly these practices are international anyway, undermining notions of national architecture – more important a crucible these days are the practices they meet at. Having said that, you’d think a British magazine might put more British architects on the list. But then, the key thing that is giving all these youngsters their big break is the culture of open architecture competitions – and that’s something this country desperately needs. REX
“We’ve made a recent rule: we don’t talk about OMA anymore,”says Joshua Prince-Ramus, co-founder, with Erez Ella, of REX Architects. The practice, which used to be the New York branch of Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture, seceded in 2006 in what was effectively a bloodless trans-Atlantic coup. Prince-Ramus and Ella went with their mentor’s blessing, apparently, but their relationship to Rotterdam is still a sensitive subject. REX, it has been frequently pointed out, did not have an average start in life. Young American practices have few challenging outlets: a loft conversion here or a beach house there. As part of the most reputable practice in the world, REX cut its teeth on the design for the Seattle Public Library, one of the most important pieces of American architecture of the new century. Now independent, these 30-somethings have huge civic projects on the go, and so it’s fair to suggest that they were springboarded into the big time. “That’s a strange way of putting it,” says Prince-Ramus, in his office overlooking Manhattan’s West Village. “That if you don’t suffer you’ve had an unfair advantage.” In a tight black T-shirt, Prince-Ramus cuts the figure of the varsity jock. He is the front man – the talker – while Ella is quiet and watchful. They are architects with a very clear agenda, a mission almost, and that is to make the profession relevant again after what they see as years of marginalisation. “It’s our own damn fault,” says Prince-Ramus. “Architects have become stylists, people who do window dressing. We’re taught to say ‘that’s my vision’, and the client says ‘but that’s not what I need’. Meanwhile, all the important stuff that has a moral or social agenda, we have no involvement in anymore. That gets carried out by developers.” Their solution – one born of America’s conservative, risk management architectural climate – is to become tough, Machiavellian businessmen. They talk in terms of “liability”, “control”, “negotiating hard on contracts” and above all, putting the client’s needs first – “Once you do that, the client’s totally fine to be pushed way outside of their comfort zone.” This is the stuff, they feel, that architecture students need to be taught, not deconstructivist literary theory. A true child of OMA, REX specialises in identifying and then distinguishing a building’s different programmes. They call it “hyper-rationality”, which clearly suggests a functionalist, or performance-based, logic at the expense of anything else. In the vast and controversial Museum Plaza scheme in Louisville, due to complete in 2010, residential, business and cultural elements are all separated and piled on top of each other in what appears to be a precarious stack of skyscrapers. The interesting, and perhaps ironic, thing is that this hyper-rationality (as in the Seattle library) produces a form that is even more iconic than your average aesthetically minded icon. Its clunkiness has a kind of anti-aesthetic far more powerful than mere elegance. Picturing cities full of this stuff is scary. But REX is super-ambitious and driven, and with a large project finishing in Turkey this year and Louisville in two years it has momentum and, almost certainly, staying power. JM
ALEJANDRO ARAVENA “There is no point in discussing social housing in architectural terms,” says Alejandro Aravena, the activist-architect behind Chilean “do tank” Elemental, a collaborative team of architects, transport engineers, builders and social workers that has been rethinking low-income mass housing since 2000. “It’s a social and political problem, but we can use design to address these issues,” says Aravena. Elemental’s projects work within tight policy restrictions and with few resources. The idea is to provide a set of conditions that allow the building units to be adapted and increase in value over time, redefining social housing as an investment not an expense. “I have the luxury of operating, and being trained, in the third world,” says Aravena. “I can afford to be primitive enough.” This sense of the primitive, of boiling a design down to its most relevant and irreducible essence, runs through the work of his private practice, including several widely acclaimed buildings for Santiago’s Universidad Católica. These works attempt to “move backwards rather than forwards”, reflecting the basic values of informal education. Aravena, who has held visiting professorships at Harvard and the AA and is widely published, is currently applying his disciplined approach to a children’s education centre for Vitra, to sit snugly between Zaha and Siza in Weil-am-Rhein. “I’m trying to be cutting edge. It’s more like what architects are expected to do.” OW image Cristobal Palma
ONE TO WATCH: STUDIO EBV Barcelona-based Studio EBV hasn’t built a thing, but a catalogue of winning competition entries in the form of beautiful black-and-white images of buildings that appear to be hewn from rock – including the one below for the Ribera del Duero Wine headquarters – has earned this small office the title of young Spanish architects of the year and attracted interest from Herzog & de Meuron. EBV’s design process is a slow and careful one. “We always start with the same thing, with pencils and models,” says co-founder Alberto Veiga. “We can’t work in any other way. The computer models all come later.” EBV has been invited to take part in the giddy task of building 100 villas in 100 days for a project run by Ai Weiwei, due in 2009. BG
FAT Taste, the word that completes FAT’s acronym – Fashion Architecture Taste – is something this London-based trio takes distinct pleasure in flouting. At a time when postmodernists are as common as bell bottoms, here’s a practice building Dutch-gabled housing in Manchester and a wedding-cake neo-Gothic art academy in the Netherlands. But why is this important? Well, for one thing, FAT is a perpetual slap in the face of the polite neo-modernism that characterises the mainstream of British architecture. At the same time, it renounces the mouse-happy swoops of the digital revolution. The natural successors to Venturi Scott Brown and Michael Graves, this practice is pursuing an alternative route populated by follies and tinged with eccentricity and nostalgia. “It’s about communication,” says co-founder Sam Jacob. “We want to make architecture that’s engaged as a cultural activity – we’re not interested in form-making or exploiting technology.” Playful and irreverent, FAT’s work avoids the academicism of so much earlier postmodernism. This is a practice immersed in popular culture – from football to children’s TV – with a conversational talent for shooting down pretension with a witty lowbrow reference. The writing and teaching of all three members – who are currently spreading the word as visiting professors at Yale – ought to be influential. And for a local institution, they’re still surprisingly young. JM image Johan Van Gemert
JESKO FEZER If anyone out there still believes that architects are people with strong mathematical skills who build houses (and there are many who do) then they should look out for Jesko Fezer. Although conventionally trained, Fezer works with urbanists, writers, architects and activists to try and make changes in cities without resorting to building. His work with the Institute for Applied Urbanism produced a subtle and beautiful intervention for Palais Thinnfeld gallery in Graz last year. Through his work with An Architektur magazine, Fezer organises Camps for Oppositional Architecture – a conference of around 250 architects exploring interventionist tactics. He also manages to co-run the independent bookshop Pro qm in Berlin and a seven-inch record label, and he teaches and exhibits. All of these activities are related to architecture, but they aren’t traditional role of an architect. Fezer might be the name on this list, but his work describes the versatile practice of a multitude of independent architects working outside the traditional boundaries of a one-name office. Of course, you might never have heard of them as individuals, but this is design beyond authorship and makes it all the more interesting. CC image Michael Maier
BIG Bjarke Ingels bounces across his studio past a dozen white and green foam models and pauses to inspect a giant Lego construction. The model is going to be shipped over to New York for the first retrospective of what should be a fledgling practice. But with a staff of 75 and a stellar media presence, there is little doubt that Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) is fully hatched. The dotcom boom might have had something to do with it, muses the effervescent Ingels, 33, who left his post at OMA to co-found Plot with Julien De Smedt when they were 25. “19-year-old programmers were becoming billionaires overnight and Frank Gehry had invented the icon,” says Ingels. “It seemed totally possible for us.” The genesis of one of the most hotly tipped young practices in Europe was intriguingly not in architecture, but in film. The friends applied to fund a movie and did a few architecture competitions on the side. “After six months we had won three competitions in a row and we got a ‘no’ for funding for the movie,” says Ingels. “So we became architects.” Then followed five years of remarkable success. Plot captivated the architectural public in Europe, winning both competitions – for social projects such as public housing and a psychiatric hospital – and awards by the armful. However, the practice split acrimoniously in 2006. While his former partner De Smedt works across the world, Ingels is happy to concentrate his energies on Copenhagen. “There is an entire side of architecture that is strategic, which is easier to do in places where you have intimate knowledge, where you can be cheeky.” Strategically, BIG is doing well. The major projects in the office are four towers in Copenhagen of up to 180m. At the moment there is a 45m height limit in the city but there is a political pressure to densify, and the office is waiting for the mayor’s decision. Other projects on the go are a hotel in Sweden, and – a recent major coup – the Copenhagen Maritime Museum competition, a project Ingels describes as the anti-icon, a hole in the ground. His manifesto, entitled, BIGamy, is about resisting “conceptual monogamy” to ideas: “Rather than being radical by saying fuck the establishment... we want to try to turn pleasing into a radical agenda.” In principle, he is saying that rebelling is useless, as the existing system is the result of a series of rebellions. What good would another revolution do? His solution is to be everything to everyone. It’s a pretty savvy bit of business rhetoric, and also a clear sign of the influence of Ingels’ time at OMA. Despite the bright colours, the persona, the graphics, his approach to architecture boils down to Occam’s razor: the simpler the object and clearer the derivation of the idea, the better. In other words, if it’s not memorable and it’s not easy to understand, it’s not there. “People do get excited about good ideas. If your ideas start with something people can relate to, not like French philosophy or Jewish mysticism, but if they’re about football fields and affordable homes and parks, people get it. And they like it if they get it.” BG image Dominik Gigler
ARCHITECTURE FOR HUMANITY The concept of Architecture for Humanity is brilliantly simple. Architect Cameron Sinclair and his wife Kate Stohr set up a charity that connects communities that need design with architects willing to offer their services for nothing. It was founded in 1999 and has mushroomed in popularity and impact over the past few years, with 47 chapters, 250 members and celebrity supporters including Cameron Diaz and Oprah Winfrey. Based in San Francisco, AfH celebrated its 100th project last year (compared with just seven projects two years ago) and is estimated to have helped around 14,000 people worldwide. Projects range from housing for Hurricane Katrina victims in Biloxi, Mississippi, to tsunami resettlements in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Born in London, it was Sinclair’s postgraduate studies at the Bartlett that inspired him to leave for the USA. While his classmates were busy designing signature buildings, Sinclair developed a shelter for New York’s homeless. His tutor asked him to resubmit his drawings, saying his work was too depressing. “I bought a one-way ticket to New York and left, overnight,” said Sinclair in an interview with icon last year. In March 2007, Sinclair launched the Open Architecture Network (OAN), which offers free construction blueprints of AfH’s best (and worst) projects. “The whole network is based around the lessons we’ve learned over the last nine years. We don’t want other people to have to learn them – we’ve made those mistakes.” Sinclair has won numerous awards for his work, including the prestigious TED award in 2006. He recently launched the AMD Open Architecture Challenge, offering $250,000 towards the construction of computer labs for Kenya, Nepal and Ecuador. The winning designs will be announced in April 2008. CM
ONE TO WATCH: SERIE With one partner in Mumbai and the other in London, Serie is poised to capitalise on one of the world’s emerging architecture markets. The duo has received a number of commissions on the subcontinent, from interiors to schools, offices and shopping malls, all with a calm, intelligent, fluid design – as seen in the proposal for Brockholes visitor centre in Lancashire, below. “In India flair comes first,” says co-founder Christopher Lee, who teaches at London’s Architectural Association. “If you’re experimental with your ideas and you have a good design then that’s all they need to know. If we were only based in the UK, where it’s all about experience and red tape, we’d still be doing house extensions.” BG
PHILIPPE RAHM If the environment is the essential topic of our times, why is it that “green” architecture is so devoid of ideas? Solar panels, planted roofs, insulated cladding… yawn. How about an architecture that has no predetermined form or function but is so flexible that it can continually adapt to seasonal or even diurnal weather conditions? This – a proposal for a pavilion in Nantes, France – is just a run of the mill concept from Philippe Rahm. Rahm has made a career at the more theoretical margins of architecture, dealing with the invisible and building with the immaterial. What he describes as “creating space with other media” might involve dividing space by temperature or light wavelength. He designed a greenhouse-style cafe for the École des Beaux-Arts in which you rehydrate not by drinking but by simply exposing yourself to the heightened humidity of the air inside. Rahm is something of a wildcard on this list. Who knows if he’ll ever break out of the exhibition circuit, but his work will almost certainly be influential. He understands better than anyone that all buildings are unnatural, and that the best way to protect the atmosphere is to use atmosphere as our material. JM
6A “We have no 20-year plan for world domination,” says Tom Emerson of 6a architects, although the trajectory of the firm might suggest otherwise. Founded in 2001 by Emerson and Stephanie MacDonald, 6a has quickly moved from small-scale residential and retail projects, such the Oki-ni shop on Savile Row (2001) and the Hairywood pavilion for the Architecture Foundation (2005), to major undertakings such as the Artillery Lane Contemporary Arts Foundation in Spitalfields, set to complete in November 2008. Recognised for its sensitive yet unconventional solutions to each brief, Emerson believes 6a’s unique trait is its desire to tell a story. “We’re very interested in narrative,” says Emerson. “The process of design always begins with research, about trying to find something we want to communicate.” At Artillery Lane, this meant delving into the history of the two Georgian terraces on the site. “They were the victims of very violent fires,” says Emerson, “yet despite this attack, they retained their essence and their character. In our use of burnt timber for the cladding, we are recalling states of the building. It becomes an aesthetic dialogue between the old and the new.” Emerson says the present challenge for 6a is adapting to the demands of larger public projects. “The scale of our work is changing radically. Making good big buildings is a different art to small-scale buildings. There are different challenges and constraints, and we’re encountering these complexities. It’s really exciting. And well, so far, so good.” CM
WORK ARCHITECTURE COMPANY “We think we’re funnier than OMA,” claims Dan Wood, who founded New York-based Work Architecture Company with partner Amale Andraos in 2002, after almost ten years leading projects in the Rotterdam office. “We use humour as much as possible,” says Andraos. “It makes the work more exciting, and it helps us to enter difficult situations.” These range from the politically charged complexities of downtown Beirut to the whimsical aspirations of speculative culture parks in central China. The practice’s witty outlook is combined with an avidly analytical approach and broad urban agenda, applied with rigour to every project regardless of scale – from its Greenbelt City masterplan for Las Vegas to the psyche of the Manhattan dog, the subject of its first commission. “We did a lot of research into the life of the urban dog,” says Wood. “They have real problems, especially with their self-esteem” – an observation that led to Villa Pup, a state-of-the-art doghouse complete with treadmill and plasma screen simulators. Decidedly more low-tech, and a product of the duo’s “eco-urbanism” studio at Princeton, is its recent winning proposal for the MoMA/PS1 summer stage. Public Farm is a dramatically tilted canopy of planted cardboard tubes, to be eagerly tended by a crack squad of urban farmers this summer. OW
MAD After training at Yale, Beijing-born Ma Yansong spent time in London honing his theatrical, formal tendencies with Zaha Hadid before returning to China to found MAD in 2004. His aim was to “embrace the advent of a new era” and begin constructing a brave new world of undulating surfaces and twisting towers. MAD made waves in 2006 as the first Chinese office to win a major competition outside China with its 56-storey “Marilyn Monroe” tower for Mississauga, Canada. This was followed by several high-profile projects back home, including the mega-blob Erdos Museum in Inner Mongolia. “Maybe Chinese tradition is invention,” says Ma, “to change the old conventions, to do something bold and new.” Although he clearly welcomes the commercial potentials of this new era, it is possible to read a critical political agenda beneath all the gloss. The compelling Beijing 2050 project, for example, reconfigures Tiananmen Square as a “People’s Park” with vast cultural facilities buried beneath a landscaped mountain, while the Central Business District receives a floating, multimedia business-leisure land, hovering ominously over CCTV and other imminent Western interventions. OW
ONE TO WATCH: JUNYA ISHIGAMI The white, weightless, willowy world that SANAA has been fashioning for the past decade achieves apotheosis in the work of Junya Ishigami. After four years under SANAA partner Kazuyo Sejima’s wing, Ishigami burst into flight in 2005 with an extraordinary piece of furniture – a steel table nearly 10m long but only 3mm thick. Further gravity-defying feats have followed: the 2007 installation Balloon (left) is a building-sized warped cube levitated by a soul of helium; an educational building just completed resembles a bamboo forest. For Ishigami, all this lightness of being is a means, not an end – towards architecture as a finely tuned scientific instrument. “By balancing all factors equally,” he says, “we aim to reveal reality as it is, rather than as we would wish it to be.” JW
JDS ARCHITECTS “Rock star architects…?” laughs Julien De Smedt. “I appreciate the idea, but you know, I really hate rock and roll.” De Smedt puts his feet up on the desk in front of him and winks as its owners and our hosts, Oslo-based architect Space Group, peer into the meeting room with raised eyebrows. He puts his feet down. Everyone’s in high spirits because De Smedt’s office, Copenhagen-based JDS Architects, has just been announced as the winner of the Holmenkollen Ski Jump competition – with a luminous elegant profile that promises to be one of Scandinavia’s major landmarks. A second office is about to open in his native city of Brussels and his first monograph has just been published. I first met De Smedt in Copenhagen in 2006, a few months after Plot, the practice he co-founded with Bjarke Ingels, had closed – somewhat bitterly. Although he declined to comment on the split, what was clear was De Smedt’s fierce ambition about his future independent from Ingels. He opened his office with 25 staff and 20 projects at an age when most architects would be happy just to be project architect on a single building. Belgian-born De Smedt, 33, is one of the many children of OMA to find success on their own. But as fundamental as his internship with Koolhaas was to his career, he frequently refers to seven years skateboarding on the streets of Brussels, ripping off the benches, pavements and buildings of the city, as an overarching influence. He strongly believes it has guided his approach to design and presents a theory of architecture as one based on the real; a concern for the tactile and an ability to manipulate and play with even the most mundane of scenarios. But perhaps this “streetwise” stuff more often emerges in resilience to authority, which leads in De Smedt’s case to a particularly tangential logic, an inability to tolerate pretension and a hell of a lot of confidence. At best, it has the potential to give projects the rigour of Koolhaas but with the delicacy of SANAA. At worst there is ego, arguments and a jetset lifestyle that unnerves even the most faithful of clients. His progress has been rapid for all these reasons, but it’s hard to discount luck. The collaboration with Ingels, whom he met at OMA, led to five dizzy years in Copenhagen winning competitions and building some remarkable and influential projects – from the VM Housing to the Maritime Youth house that is reminiscent of the Yokohama Ferry Terminal – all before the age of 30. “I don’t think there is any comparison to what we did,” says De Smedt. “It was incredible and insane. So much happened in so little time. It not only excelled in ambition but in our resolve and in scale. Somehow it’s only now that we see it.” De Smedt’s moments of sentimentality are rare and he is primarily interested in talking about the present. Current projects range from a one-off house in Taiwan and one of the 100 villas for Ai Weiwei in Mongolia to being in the final two for a competition for a riverside development in Rimini, and most spectacularly a commission for a 1,111m-high tower in Shenzhen – a vertical city on a massive scale. In contrast to the dramatic Logistic City project for Shenzhen, the appointment to build a 7,000sq m Buddhist institute in Paris was a selection by karma. “We had a cup of tea, talked about the project and that’s it,” says De Smedt. “They felt that the karma was right, so we got the job. It was a very pleasant way to be interviewed.” But you don’t run an office on karma, and like Plot, JDS has a forceful, proactive approach to work. The practice continually enters competitions and approaches landowners with proposals. In recent weeks the Holmenkollen Ski Jump has been through some financial jitters, but it became the subject of a massive campaign of media lobbying and careful persuasion by De Smedt and was reinstated by the city. “We showed them a series of interventions. We made clear the fact that they could not discard us. Even Rem is bending over for clients when he needs to. We’re just not the kind of architects that say ‘Fuck it’ and leave.” BG portrait Mark Guthrie
INFORMATION BASED ARCHITECTURE Rotterdam practice Information Based Architecture stands to gain huge attention for its 660m-high Guangzhou TV headquarters when it opens in 2010. It’s not only impressive that a young and relatively unknown office is building the equivalent of Koolhaas’ CCTV headquarters in Beijing, it’s also quite a feat that the design is an elegant alternative to the power towers of Dubai and Shanghai. The slender skyscraper, which betrays the office’s origins under Philippe Starck and Zaha Hadid, saw off competition from Richard Rogers, KPF and Coop Himmelb(l)au when it won in 2004. “It looks organic, the hourglass shape reminded them of the female form,” says co-founder Mark Hemel. At 350m high so far, the tower has now reached the low-lying clouds over the city. “There will be a skywalk halfway up that looks like it might turn into a cloud walk!” laughs Hemel. “There will be interesting internal spaces too, with experiences between floors and volumes. The idea is that the tower will be less superficial than others.” BG
LIMITED DESIGN Limited Design is trying to stay small against all odds. The practice was founded by Wang Hui, who unlike so many Chinese architects that were educated and apprenticed in the West, is true homegrown talent. He believes in working very closely with both builders and clients in order to achieve his standards, which means taking on relatively small projects. This preference for smaller projects really stands out in a nation busy making itself anew, on a scale that is unimaginable by European standards. It’s a place where architects come in search of bigness, and speed; and amid this landscape of rapid transformation Limited Design carefully picks its projects and establishes long-term relationships with clients, keeping design quality high on its agenda. Its growing portfolio consists of luxury residences and pavilions in idyllic (private) landscapes, galleries and contemporary art museums, and small public buildings such as his outstanding stone school in Tibet. The building is low and discreet, spread across the barren landscape more like a small village than a single building.Wang Hui promotes his 100 per cent Chinese image in full knowledge of its past, preferring local and historical references to more popular Western ones. Limited Design is young, sophisticated and cool, and extremely strategic about its profile. It is seeking recognition of the right kind, and is rapidly becoming a role model, inspiring the ambitions of a new generation of young Chinese architects. CC image Cao Youtao
ONE TO WATCH: CARMODY GROARKE The current sweetheart of the UK architectural scene, Carmody Groarke had a pretty good 2007. The practice was awarded Young Architect of the Year and won an invited competition for the Osnaburgh Street Pavilion (below) for Regent’s Place, London, with an urban forest of tall thin metal elements punctuated by benches and public space. The London-based studio will be attempting to live up to the buzz that surrounds it when a host of projects open in the next few months – a home for artist Julian Opie, a refurbishment of the Electric Ballroom in North London and an underground swimming pool in Limerick, Ireland. Australian-born Kevin Groarke admits that the nascent practice has yet to develop a signature style, and describes its design methods as “traditional”, although there is little doubt Carmody Groarke is in the top league for stylish British modernism. CM
SOU FUJIMOTO A portrait of Einstein looks out over Sou Fujimoto’s studio. The great physicist serves as a daily inspiration for the theoretical ambitions and scientific approach of this young architects work – an attempt to build a theory of relativity in architectural terms. A graduate of Tokyo University, Fujimoto set up shop straight out of school. Avoiding the traditional blooding of young talent at the hands of an established master, his work is marked by a rare independence in a world where patronage and lineage remain powerful assets. He is best known for a series of five interventions developed over as many years for a welfare facility in his native Hokkaido. Like a series of finely tuned experiments, this project formed the test-bed for Fujimoto’s functional and formal explorations of the relations between repeated architectural units. “This method of making, in which elements respond mutually to each other, but without reference to a larger organisational pattern, results in a ‘soft order’ that is very interesting,” says Fujimoto. “It enables useful ambiguities within which individuals can adjust their relation to the collective.” Upcoming projects include an apartment in Tokyo that looks like it’s formed from a stack of plastic Monopoly houses, and a library at an art university in Tokyo’s suburbs. JW image Daici Ano
ONE TO WATCH: DORELL GHOTMEH TANE It’s hard to get more international than exquisitely talented trio Dorell Ghotmeh Tane. The three friends from Italy, Lebanon and Japan were working for Jean Nouvel and David Adjaye when they won an open competition for the Estonian Museum in January 2006 (pictured above). The design is a long, low structure clad in roughly etched glass, a camouflaged reference to the site’s former use as a military airfield. “We thought it can be beautiful inside, but outside it needs to communicate something about the country’s continued occupation,” says Lina Ghotmeh. DTG has since added a masterplan and hotel to the site of the museum, and back in Paris the studio has been experimenting with projects designing fashion runways and stage sets for contemporary dance. For such a young practice – barely two years old – its designs show real strength and the high standards of context and precision rise above even the trio’s previous offices. “I think it’s because we’re from three different countries,” says Ghotmeh. “There is perhaps a more political side from Dan [Dorell] because he lived in Beirut – a complexity to the way he sees spaces. Tsuyoshi [Tane] is from Japan and from him there is a certain purity, perhaps even idealism.” BG
FELD72 There is an abundance of laterally minded architecture practices working all over Europe, putting subversive urban acupuncture into action across our cities. Of those, Feld72 has made it onto this list for its particular wit and charm and because it is one of the most accessible in terms of public engagement. At last year’s São Paulo Biennial, the studio took its cue from the city that is famous for its absence of billboard advertising and put T-shirts branded with its messages onto 70 mannequins. Its investigations into public and private space also led it to engage with drivers in traffic jams. “We saw that there were all these people, very close, and they can’t connect with each other,” says Feld72’s Richard Scheich. The solution was to provide a kit with a pen and pencil so drivers could pass their mobile numbers to each other along with a pack including, among other things, a plastic flower, a condom and a water pistol. In Vienna the practice has been trying to open up its expertise to the general public with YouTube shows and public consultancies. Feld72’s work is compelling not just because it shuns typical approaches, but for finding strategies that don’t just involve building. But, as shown by its Wine Centre in Caldaro – the practice’s first building project – it is clearly adept at both. BG
As you may have noticed, we could have written a whole feature on the offices spawned from the architecture-incubator of OMA. Here are a few of the names that have emerged from OMA since it opened in 1975: |
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