Barcelona's Sagrada Familia Cathedral is often at the center of events: in recent years, in the opinion of the concerned public, it was threatened by the construction of a nearby railway tunnel, or by the originality of architects finishing the construction of Gaudí on their own. But last Tuesday, the danger was more real: a mentally ill person climbed into the sacristy and set fire to the robes of the priests stored there, according to the BBC video. As a result, the interior of Gaudí, created during the life of the architect, was almost completely destroyed. The arsonist was detained by tourists and handed over to the police. The Guardian reminds that this is not the first arson of the cathedral: in 1936 the anarchists did the same, and a significant part of Antoni Gaudi's drawings and layouts perished in the fire, which became an indirect reason for the “free” treatment of the building by the successors of his work.
The atmosphere around F. L. Wright Teilisin (Taliesin) in Wisconsin, where the architect has lived and worked for over 40 years. This year the ensemble celebrates its centenary: in 1911, Wright began construction, but, in fact, never finished. Until his death in 1959, he used it as a testing ground for new ideas, and here he also opened his own school. Now the complex functions as a museum, but also several families still live in it, including former students of Wright: none of the guardians of the ensemble wants Teilisin to turn into a dead monument to the past.
The Westside mall, built on the outskirts of Bern according to the project of Daniel Libeskind, will hardly be 100 years old. Soon after it opened in 2008, the ceiling of the food court collapsed there, and now the same fate befell the ceiling of the pool (in both cases, several visitors were injured). A controversy flared up among the readers of Building Design: may such problems be associated with flaws in the architectural design, or unscrupulous engineers / contractors are to blame.
If the structures listed above are quite famous, then the array of social housing in Lima described by the Domus magazine, built under the auspices of the UN in the early 1970s, is today almost forgotten by everyone. In the 1960s, Peru was headed by Fernando Belaunde Terry, an architect by training. Then the population increased rapidly, the number of townspeople grew especially rapidly, which led to the emergence of slums. An international team of architects was invited to Lima, tasked with creating scalable designs for cheap houses from manufactured materials. The best of the variants of 13 Peruvian and 13 foreign craftsmen were implemented, and a total of 500 buildings formed the PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda) area. Among the foreign participants were metabolists (Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurakawa, Kionori Kikutake), Aldo Van Eyck, James Sterling, Charles Correa, Christopher Alexander and other "stars" of the then architectural scene. Now these dwellings have been expanded by the efforts of the owners, although not at all in the way the authors of their projects assumed. Despite the not always convenient layout, the PREVI district enjoys the love of residents: they do not leave there even when their wealth allows them to buy something more spacious in a prestigious area. Undoubtedly, the attention paid by the authors to each project affects. As for the history of architecture, this forgotten project became the forerunner of the doctrine of ultra-cheap social housing, designed for the activity of the residents themselves - suffice it to recall the Quinta Monroy massif in Chile, Alejandro Aravena and the Elemental group.
Another social housing option - also modern and also in Chile - caught the attention of the blog Inhabitat. These are the huts for miners in the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth. There is almost never rainfall there, so architects from the Chilean bureau AATA threw a canopy over their housing estate, built from shipping containers. In addition, the canopy traps heat at night, when, like any desert, it is very cold in the Atacama. The containers are arranged in C-shaped 2-storey modules, interlocked by 6, facing the resulting patio, protected from heat and strong winds.
104-year-old luminary of modernism Oscar Niemeyer is far from such worries: his next project, approaching completion, is the Torre TV Digital concrete TV tower for Brasilia. This 185-meter-high structure is equipped with two "branches", where viewing platforms will be arranged under glass domes at a height of 60 and 80 meters, respectively, therealbrazil.com reports.
Another luminary of modern architecture, Frank Gehry gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal, in which he said that the most interesting forms for him are folded ones. Therefore, his love for Bernini, mentioned in the same place, seems to be self-evident, in particular, for his sculptural group "Ecstasy of Saint Teresa", where folds play a key role. In addition, the architect talked about his favorite conductors, a hat for Lady Gaga, an ideal home, ice hockey, and that it is too early to retire at 82 (of course, Niemeyer's example cannot but inspire his colleagues - ed..).
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