Articles by Vladimir Belogolovsky

Rahul Mehrotra is a practicing architect based in Boston and Mumbai and he has been teaching at Harvard’s GSD where he is currently Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and Director of the Master in Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program. Born in 1959, Mehrotra grew up in Lucknow, a city in Northern India and an important cultural and artistic hub. His father was a manager at a large machine tool company. The family moved a lot following Mehrotra senior’s frequent promotions, which led to changing residences owned by his company. Besides a few years in Lucknow and Delhi, they lived in different neighborhoods within Mumbai.

Kim Utzon started his small architectural practice, Kim Utzon Arkitekter, in Copenhagen in 1987, choosing to work primarily in Denmark and neighboring Sweden, to keep close ties with family and be able to reflect effectively on regional building traditions. Kim is the youngest son of Jørn Utzon (1918-2008), the Pritzker Prize-winning architect whose most celebrated buildings include the Sydney Opera House (1973), Bagsværd Church near Copenhagen (1976), and the Kuwait National Assembly Building (1982). Kim’s brother Jan Utzon is a practicing architect and his sister Lin Utzon is a ceramic artist.

Whether an apartment building, house, storefront, office interior, or restaurant, Glenn Sestig’s architecture consistently reveals itself in tidy fragments of robust and determinately monumental geometry that tends to evoke urban qualities. His austere facades, colonnades, stair landings, and even reception desks and shelf displays appear to be quite hefty and substantial. And, in fact, every project, be it a small boutique or gallery, starts with rigorous planning – visual primary and secondary axes get established, circulation flow is laid out, and major anchors are identified before the architect moves on to addressing the appropriate materials, surfaces, and details. Every space is architecture first; its program and appearance will fit into it.

In the following interview with Paul Tange, the chairman and senior principal architect at Tange Associates in Tokyo, we discussed the relationship with his famous architect-father Kenzo Tange (1913-2005; the most influential architect in postwar Japan and the winner of the 1987 Pritzker Prize), the fate of the house Tange senior built for his first family, the decision of joining his father’s practice right after graduation from Harvard, sharing his father’s design principles, and the vision behind his first independent built work – a 50-story Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower in Tokyo, a vertical campus that can accommodate up to 10,000 students; the project won an international competition, in which 50 international architects participated.

Most architects design projects in the comfort of their offices, sitting behind their desks, making decisions by looking at their flatscreens, never visiting a construction site, and managing everything remotely. This attitude may lead to a design of a sleek and even objectively beautiful building. But such a solution can’t be anywhere near a genuine response to what any given site may require. How do you even find out? Is it possible to build something new as if it were an extension of what is already there in the most innate, consequential, yet original form? The only way to find out is to start from the site itself, says Vinu Daniel, the founder of Wallmakers, an award-winning architectural practice in Trivandrum, the capital of the southern Indian state of Kerala.

London-based architect Alison Brooks was born and grew up in Canada and studied architecture at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. Upon graduation in 1988, she left for London where after working with designer Ron Arad for seven years she started Alison Brooks Architects in 1996. Her most representative works include the Stirling Prize-winning Accordia Brass Building in Cambridge, Exeter College Cohen Quad in Oxford, the Smile Pavilion for the 2016 London Design Festival, and several expressive single-family residences in London: VXO House, Fold House, Lens House, Mesh House, and Windward House.

Located in the area between Sachsendamm and Berlin Südkreuz S-Bahn train station in Schöneberg, a new mixed-use complex, EDGE Suedkreuz Berlin, was completed last month by Berlin-based architect Sergei Tchoban and his firm Tchoban Voss Architekten with additional offices in Hamburg and Dresden. The complex comprises two freestanding structures—a larger Carré Building and a smaller Solitaire Building. Together they occupy their own block. The pair is now the largest hybrid-timber complex of buildings in Germany and one of the largest in Europe.

Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946, Lodz, Poland) studied architecture at Cooper Union in New York, graduating in 1970, and received his post-graduate degree from Essex University in England in 1972. While pursuing a teaching career he won the 1989 international competition to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin before ever realizing a single building. He then moved his family there to establish a practice with his wife Nina and devoted the next decade to the completion of the museum that opened in 2001. The project led to a series of other museum commissions that explored such notions as memory and history in architecture.

Sergei Tchoban (b. 1962, Saint Petersburg, Russia) graduated from the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture at the Russian Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1986. He started his practicing career in Russia but left for Germany in 1991, becoming a managing partner of nps tchoban voss in Berlin in 1995. Since 2006, he also heads SPEECH, one of the leading architectural offices in Moscow. Apart from building his successful career of a practicing architect, he is a collector of architectural drawings, publisher, and museum owner.

What follows this short introduction is my unusually personal interview with a Lebanese-American architect and artist Nishan Kazazian. His work is inspired by numerous sources that come from many directions such as Kintsugi, the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together, primary color geometric abstractions evocative of Russian Constructivism, as well as paintings by Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. Yet, a stronger inspiration comes from his memories of home and family history. Layering and superimposition of cultures and languages were constantly present in his life since childhood and remain guiding forces to Kazazian, who is both a licensed architect and a professional artist.