When this section was just beginning its work, just recently the competition for the project of a new World Trade Center in New York ended with the victory of Daniel Libeskind, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles opened, the second - after the Guggenheim in Bilbao - a large building by Frank Gehry, demolition threatened Kennedy Ero Saarinen Airport TWA Terminal and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House. Dubai and China, oddly enough, were not yet the most important footholds for international architectural activity at that time.
Five years later, Gehry had a significant increase in finished buildings, the reconstruction of the WTC finally reached a dead end, turning into an ordinary office complex - perhaps only larger than usual, and other monuments of modernism took the place of the saved creations of Saarinen and Mies in the "risk group".
Much more than in 2003, there is talk now about "green" architecture - almost more often than about "oligarchitecture", which has taken strong positions not only in China and the Middle East, but also in the CIS countries - at least, this is the opinion many Western analysts. The largest architectural event was the Olympic Games in Beijing, the monstrous Burj Dubai continues to grow upward, to be replaced by projects of 1.5- and 2-kilometer skyscrapers, Rem Koolhaas is trying to bring out a new formula for a construction boom in the UAE, and Tom Main predicts them an unenviable fate if natural resources are not used more wisely there …
Projects that five years ago were only layouts and renders have found real embodiment - for example,
Princeton Gehry Library or the new terminal at Beijing Foster Airport; others, on the contrary, were closed: among them are the large-scale memorial "Topography of Terror" by Peter Zumthor for Berlin and the London building of the Zaha Hadid Architectural Foundation.
Major tenders began and ended: for the reconstruction of the Le Halle complex in Paris or the conversion of the High Line railway overpass into a city park in New York. The succession of laureates of annual major awards has changed, led by Pritzker's: flawless candidates alternated with ambiguous ones, but the classification of each individual awarded to the first or second depends, of course, only on the point of view. Three Venice Biennials took a special place in the news feed, covering architectural metamorphoses, the problem of urbanization and “architecture besides buildings”.
The foreign news section itself has also changed: the actual information messages and analytical materials have received an addition in the form of a voluminous directory of architects, workshops, buildings and projects. The illustration range has significantly expanded in comparison with earlier versions, it has become more convenient for visitors to leave their comments. Of course, we are only at the beginning of the road, and the growth prospects have not yet been fully explored. Therefore, we hope to celebrate with you, our readers, a few more round dates, but for now we are always looking forward to your suggestions and wishes.
