According to The Scotsman, the Scots are the landscape architects of GROSS. MAX. and Sutherland Hussey won the competition for a renovation project for Berlin's famous Temppelhof Airport, which Foster called "the mother of all airports." Its 1930s building will be preserved, and its airfield will be converted into a recreational area with an area larger than New York's Central Park: almost 400 hectares. The runways will be left for skateboarders and kite lovers, a pavilion and a hollow mountain will be built that climbers can conquer from the inside and outside. But the main part of the territory will be occupied by a huge park: work on its creation will be completed in 2017 and will cost 61 million euros.
But the main newsmaker in recent days has become Zaha Hadid: for the first time she entered the list of the 2000 richest Britons compiled by The Sunday Times: her fortune was estimated at 37 million pounds. In addition to her, only one architect got into this company: Norman Foster with his $ 168 million.
According to Building Design, Hadid also said she plans to compete for high-rise projects in London. She had to thus expand her "sphere of influence" after the closure of projects in Egypt and Libya, which forced her to lay off a quarter of her employees. According to Hadid, skyscrapers should be built in the center of the British capital, as they are easy to combine with the green space needed by the citizens at ground level, although all such buildings must be thoughtfully fit into the “silhouette” of London.
At the same time, her mobile pavilion Chanel Mobile Art, which was planned to be shown in major cities of the world, but did not work out due to the crisis, "got a joke" at the Institute for the Arab World in Paris, where it will complement the famous building of Jean Nouvel as an additional exhibition area. The first exhibition there was a retrospective of the works of Hadid herself.
But if you can't go to the French capital in the near future, you can be content with a 26-gigapixel panorama of Paris posted on the Internet by two photographers and a company that develops a program for stitching panoramas.
No less interesting photos can be seen on the Inhabitat website: the report is dedicated to the partially realized eco-city of Masdar, created by Norman Foster's design in Abu Dhabi - unmanned electric vehicles, solar panels on each building and the rest of its "green" elements.
A completely different approach to nature is demonstrated by the Tenjinyama Atelier office in the Japanese province of Gunma, which is described by Domus magazine. Architect Takashi Fujino created it for his Ikimono Architects workshop: it is a structure of four concrete walls and a glass ceiling. The floor is the soil, in which you can grow any plants, the main of which is the eucalyptus, chosen for its fresh scent. In summer, its crown shades the interior; in winter, bare branches do not interfere with the sun's rays. The openings in the walls that are not closed at all provide not only natural ventilation, but also the opportunity to live in contact with nature, quite in the spirit of traditional Japanese culture.
The management of Google is thinking about a more familiar "green" architecture: in the Californian town of Mountain View, which they have chosen for a long time, they are planning to build a new headquarters on an area of 3.80 hectares. According to the San Jose Mercury News, this should be as “sustainable” as possible, so Christoph Ingenhoven, a renowned green building advocate, was brought in to develop the 55,750 m2 project.
But not all California homeowners are as responsible for the environment as Google: The Architect's Newspaper has published a list of the largest mansions (or better to say: palaces) in Los Angeles, which amaze not only with their size and ugliness, but also the thoughtless waste of those who ordered their projects. people.
Concluding our review on a sad note, we note that nothing is known about the fate of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who was arrested at the Beijing airport on April 3. Despite the fact that the PRC authorities expressed their displeasure with the indifferent attitude of foreign politicians and cultural figures to this incident, the protests continue. One of them was the dedication to Weiwei of the largest work of Anish Kapoor's work "Leviathan", which is now on display in Paris, the other - a T-shirt with the inscription "Free Ai Weiwei", the idea of the BIG bureau and the Archinect web portal.
N. F.
