In this article in The Times, Tom Dyckhoff notes how “un-iconic” the Arhcitectural Review award winners are:
[Just another point of view for our local panelists to discuss at the City Program “Paradise Builders” event on February 1 at SFU Harbour Centre, 7 pm. Save the date.]… in the age of unquestioning devotion to icon architecture, their winners — usually unstarry, un-gargantuan, but always damned clever buildings, addressing very human, social, environmental needs — have long seemed simply perverse, fogeyish, almost betraying the enlightened, but once rather unzeitgeisty proclivities of their sponsor, Architectural Review magazine. When there’s a fashionable rising superstar’s computer generated, megabucks art gallery to lavish awards on? Who’d pick a willowy community project or a tea house in Japan?
Awards below the cut:
“Air trees” by Ecosistema Urbano Arquitectos in a new suburban estate in Madrid, comprises a series of lightweight metal drums raised on zigzag columns, stuffed with plants of a size and type picked by the neighbourhood.
The combined effect, of course, encourages community cohesion through its creation. But, more importantly, they simply cool the parched streets down, through the plants transpiration, and the shape of the pavilions, which funnel air down to the ground, is a low-tech way of ameliorating an ever-rising problem in Mediterranean cities facing the effects of global warming.
The second winner also greens the sweating city, but is even simpler — …. beams of vegetation installed across a cutting in the cityscape in cramped Tokyo by Taketo Shimohigoshi, turning unused overlooked space into an impromptu skygarden.
The third, though, is the cleverest. It’s another take on the “one-off-house-that-could-be-mass-produced” schtick that’s been modernism’s staple diet for decades, only given a “slow architecture” twist: this is almost architecture without architects.
Chilean firm FAR: Frohn & Rojas have created a form that could be made with largely unskilled labour, yet which remains architecturally ambitious, several steps up from a favela shack. It’s made from layers, like a Russian doll. First a small concrete “cave” at its heart. Second, hung from this, a prefabricated series of rooms made from glulam — a reinforced plywood. Third, wrapping the whole, a polycarbonate skin. And fourth, an “energy screen” hung over the whole like a tent to shield it from the burning sun. It proves that the most exciting architecture in the world doesn’t have to be big, but it is clever.
