032c Presents: The Architecture Reading List

Looking back at 16 years of 032c, it is safe to say one of our main obsessions is architecture. To avoid frantically leafing through back issues, here is 032c’s Online Guide to some of our favorite architecture features.

REM KOOLHAAS: Consistent Modesty and the Strelka Institute in Moscow

While the architecture field has changed more in the last 30 years than in the previous 3,000, architectural education has mostly failed to keep pace. The Strelka Institute in Moscow proposes a different way of looking at architecture: not only for the general improvement of design, but with the intention of introducing research as the most essential basis of architectural education. AMO is developing an educational program with Strelka to address a range of issues that are pertinent worldwide, and particularly urgent in Russia.

Read the interview with REM KOOLHAAS from 032c Issue 20.

JÜRGEN MAYER H.: Germany’s Greatest Architecture Hope Since Bauhaus

Mayer H. belongs to the first generation of German architects for whom “modern” no longer means new and avant-garde buildings, but rather something that is a given, and therefore taken for granted. The architect gave us METROPOL PARASOL, updating an old Sevillian plaza into a 21st century public space.

Read our portrait on MAYER H. from 032c’s Issue 16 here.

BLACK IS A HARD DRUG: ODILE DECQ

“Human beings aren’t symmetrical. It’s an abstraction that doesn’t interest me!”

Diverse and multifaceted, ODILE DECQ’s practice includes everything from small household objects to interiors, furniture, and lighting to full-scale urban design. Neither “iconic” nor showy photogenic, her architecture is based on the experience of the body moving through space as well as in attention to detail, both visual and behavioral. Her enemies are symmetry, inauthentic use of material, conventional thinking, and boredom.

Read the portrait from 032c’s Issue 26 on DECQ here, with photographs by JUERGEN TELLER.

OMA AMO w/for PRADA

Every year, Prada holds four runway shows in a windowless concrete hall at its headquarters in Milan. This industrial space has become the blank canvas for the world-famous architects OMA to produce a dazzling array of immersive runway shows. They are a testing ground for new formulations in the relationship between culture and commerce.

REM KOOLHAAS, IPPOLITO PESTELLINI LAPARELLI, and project architects GIACOMO ARDESIO and GIULIO MARGHERI discuss the longstanding collaboration between two global powerhouses in 032c’s Issue 31. Read it here.

CLAUDE PARENT: The Supermodernist

CLAUDE PARENT was the last Parisian Supermodernist. He built floors as ramps and supermarkets that look like cliffs. He was celebrated for his domestic landscapes and hated for his nuclear power plants. Read here how Claude Parent was rediscovered in 032c’s Issue 20.

CEDRIC PRICE: Limited Lifespan of Cities

“Cities exist for citizens, and if they do not work for citizens, they die.”

For 032c’s Issue 2, HANS ULRICH OBRIST spoke with architect CEDRIC PRICE on the limited lifespan of cities. Read the interview here.

HAUS DER KUNST: Built Ideology

A think tank of architects was conceived to ponder the remarkable building Haus der Kunst, which is not an easy building to think in. It is a building that, in a certain way, was designed to stop people from thinking. The think tank has to work against the building’s capacity to stop people from thinking. It is a difficult project and very, very interesting.

Read here how MARK WIGLEY, JACQUES HERZOG, and REM KOOLHAAS address the mutual complicity and unspoken manifesto of the Haus der Kunst in 032c’s Issue 15.

ARCHITECTURE POST-INTERNET: ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS

Although trained as an architect, ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS has eschewed designing physical spaces. After the economic crisis in Greece derailed his first brick-and-mortar projects, Angelidakis began creating architectural spaces that live as networked environments, navigated through web browsers and virtual worlds. As such, his work has become a meditation on the idea of ruin – both ancient and economic – and the potential of architecture as a site of real-time social engagement.

Read Carson Chan’s interview with ANGELIDAKIS for 032c’s Issue 27 here.

FERNANDO ROMERO

A young architect designs a 34 million dollar museum in Mexico City, with fine art (think Rodin) and free admission, for the world’s richest man – who just happens to be his father-in-law.

Here is FERNANDO ROMERO in 032c’s Issue 21.

Anti-Villa: ARNO BRANDLHUBER’s Thinking Model for a New 21st Century Architecture

When ARNO BRANDLHUBER bought the property of his ANTI-VILLA in 2012 with two friends, he made relatively few changes to the former underwear factory, refusing the path of adapting the building to contemporary notions of what is attractive and aesthetically pleasing.

Read 032c’s piece from Issue 28 on BRANDLHUBER’s bona fide “Smart Home” here.

HANS HOLLEIN: The Showroom Master

He designed mesmerizing interiors to display candles, Monets, and Bronze Age ceramics. His use of media, technology, and spectacle was prescient. He long understood that commerce is culture and that culture is commercial. His bold call for a “Return to Architecture” was only made stronger by his declaration that “Everything is Architecture.”

This is HANS HOLLEIN in 032c’s Issue 25.

MARK WIGLEY

“An architect is a foreigner. A strange person. A person that thinks that buildings are alive. A child in disguise.”

Architect MARK WIGLEY talked about provocation in architecture, if there is such a thing as “natural style,” and the monolith in Space Odyssey in 032c’s Issue 13. Read more here.

THE CHERMAYEFF CENTURY

For the newest wave of cultural observers, the name CHERMAYEFF may not mean much. But to flip through the hidebound epic of their collective lives, is to realize the depths of their influence in the world of architecture and design. Their tale has been spinning out for more than a century.

In 032c’s Issue 22, we embarked on a history lesson on the influential CHERMAYEFF CLAN. Read more here.

CHRISTIAN BOROS: Art Under Construction

“In 1990 the techno and fetish scene entered the bunker, and if one were to believe those that were there, it seemed like a strange return to history that grim-looking people in leather coats carrying riding whips were suddenly making a reappearance here.”

When collector CHRISTIAN BOROS purchased a renovated Nazi Bunker in order to adapt it to house his art collection, Niklas Maak paid him a visit for 032c’s Issue 14. Read more here.

SINGULARITY IS PLURAL: The Optimism of BJARKE INGELS and RAY KURZWEIL

Danish architect BJARKE INGELS founds his work on a utopian spirit not seen since the decades immediately following the last world war. Yet he is determined not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors. One of the strategies of his “pragmatic utopian architecture” is not to rely on ideologies, but simply on the the best available research. Nobody offered a vision as simultaneously daring, methodological, and researched as RAY KURZWEIL.

Read the interviews with INGELS and KURZWEIL from 032c’s Issue 20 on the future of urbanism here.

REM KOOLHAAS: Casa da Musica, Porto

REM KOOLHAAS’s Casa da Musica stands on the Rotunda da Boavista in Porto like a futuristic crustacean that has thrown the waves of the Atlantic up over the Agenda da Boavista onto land.

Here, Niklas Maak examines Koolhaas’s music hall in Porto for 032c’s Issue 10.