Word: architectes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...stage at the Met this Christmas, but then Beijing called. They wanted him to open the first performance season of China's highest palace of performance, the $40 million National Grand Theater, better known in Beijing by its shape, as the "egg." The building, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, is a gleaming dome with a subtle ying-yang design, surrounded by water and one of the most distinctive new buildings in a city consciously trying to turn itself into a 21st century metropolis...
Andrés Duany is writing the blueprint for a greener human habitat. The Miami-based architect is the co-founder, with his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zybek, of the firm DPZ, and over the years he's become a leader in what's called New Urbanism. It's a philosophy of design that tackles not so much buildings themselves as the entire built environment. Duany and his peers in New Urbanism want to stem suburban sprawl in favor of medium-density towns and neighborhoods where houses, offices, shopping and leisure activities would all be within a walkable space. The automobile...
...Geoffrey Bawa is well known in his native Sri Lanka and in design circles, but wider fame has eluded the architect who died in 2003 at the age of 84. Part of the reason is that the building style Bawa pioneered - melding Asian and global design traditions in a way that suited the requirements of monsoon climates - has become ubiquitous. Verandahs, water features, local craftwork, lush landscaping: today these kinds of elements are taken for granted in resorts, spas and villas all over the region, and it is easy to believe that it was ever thus...
...publication of David Robson's Beyond Bawa: Modern Masterworks of Monsoon Asia - a highly informative study, if at times a little dryly written - will hopefully boost the architect's posthumous profile. It also confronts Bawa's reputation for snobbery. Bawa, grants Robson, was a "paternalistic employer" who paid people poorly and seemed "to have had little understanding of how his assistants actually made ends meet." (Such notoriety dogged Bawa throughout his career. When, in 1986, a retrospective of his work was organized at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London - the first large-scale Bawa exhibit outside Sri Lanka...
...live these days with rock-star architects - Gehry, Koolhaas, Libeskind - hailed as heroic and solitary prodigies, bringing forth great edifices. While it is tempting to lobby for Bawa's inclusion in this pantheon, Robson argues that he "should not be viewed as a lone genius, but rather as someone who operated within a circle of sympathetic friends." In fact, no architect is an island, and several individuals - notably Friend, Danish architect Ulrik Plesner, and artists Barbara Sansoni and Laki Senanayake - influenced Bawa's vernacular experiments. As Robson's title suggests, Bawa's legacy, if not his personal renown, continues...