Articles by Vladimir Belogolovsky

At 92 years of age, for his entire career Yona Friedman has occupied an unusual spot within the architecture world; his signature concept, the Ville Spatiale which he first proposed in 1956, combines the top-down megastructural thinking visible in later projects such as Archigram’s Plug-In City with a total freedom for occupants to design and build their own homes within the structure. In this installment of his “City of Ideas” column, Vladimir Belogolovsky interviews Friedman at his home in Paris to talk about the Ville Spatiale and his theories of mobile and improvised architecture.

Madrid architect Alberto Campo Baeza was born in 1946 in Valladolid, Spain and grew up in Cádiz. He graduated from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 1971 and earned his PhD there in 1982. Campo Baeza has been teaching architecture at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, ETSAM for more than 40 years. He sees architecture as building ideas and expressing them in the most essential and clear ways, consistently relying on such basic elements as firmly grounded rectangular platforms, thick solid walls with deep cavities and frameless cutouts, and flat thin planes propped up by delicate posts. Colors, complex curves, and diversity of materials are largely avoided to accentuate primary relationships between elementary prisms and to exalt magic out of sunlight. Campo Baeza’s architecture is about transparency and precision, as well as asserting such fundamentals as ground planes, straight lines, and precise corners. He has built relatively few projects and, for the most part, on a small scale. Yet, his legacy is remarkably complete, consistent, profound, memorable, and inspirational.

I am fortunate to have seen numerous beautiful buildings and spaces, so when I recently went to Olot near Girona, Spain, to explore the works of 2017 Pritzker Prize Laureates, RCR Arquitectes, I thought I was all prepared. But even though I was familiar with their works through publications, what I encountered firsthand, moved me in the most surprising and delightful ways. The sheer ingenuity and brilliance of these structures, so integral to their places and consequential of their given programs, empower architecture and yield sensations that are truly special and unforgettable.

Eliezer Armon was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1955. He tried a number of career choices, including studying engineering, mathematics, and serving three and a half years in the Israeli Defense Forces, before, at the age of 25, deciding on pursuing architecture. Along the way, he also dedicated himself to becoming a Kabala scholar and a martial artist, and after 50 years of practice he is a 6th Dan master in Dennis survival Jiu-Jitsu method. Both fascinations have contributed profoundly to his work as an architect. Also, after years of duty in reserve at the Israeli Defense Forces, he was discharged with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Armon graduated from the Architecture School at the Technion in Haifa in 1985. After working at a large office in Tel Aviv he was hired as the chief engineer of Immanuel, a small settlement in Samaria. A few years later he became the chief engineer of Be’er Sheva, the capital of the Negev and the largest city in the south of Israel, becoming, at the age of 35, the youngest city engineer in all of Israel. He was responsible for planning housing and infrastructure in the region, leading the design and construction of 10,000 dwelling units in Be’er Sheva, resulting in a rapid growth of the city.

Odile Decq was born in 1955 in Laval, France and studied at École Régionale d’Architecture in Rennes, Brittany. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure D’architecture in Paris-La Villette in 1978 and received her diploma from the Paris Institute of Political Studies in 1979. Decq set up her practice in Paris the same year and soon met Benoît Cornette who was studying medicine at the time but switched to architecture. By 1985 he received his architecture degree and the couple renamed their firm into ODBC. In 1996, ODBC won the Golden Lion in Venice for their drawings, selected out of a pool of invited emerging voices that included Zaha Hadid, Enric Miralles, and Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio. That was the beginning of the computer drawings, expressing movement, ambiguities, layering, and overall new dynamics that characterize Decq’s liberated forms and spaces.

Boris Bernaskoni (born 1977, Moscow, Russia) is the leading Russian architect of his generation. He is interested in what technology can do today, so his architecture would be able to utilize it tomorrow. His work is not about façade aesthetics, which the architect says is the thing of the past. Instead, he is proposing radically new methodologies and prototypes. In the future, Bernaskoni believes, buildings will be immortal because they will continuously evolve and attune themselves to the most current technologies and demands. The ability to transform with the times will be architecture’s most precious commodity.

Lyndon Neri (b. 1965, Philippines) graduated from Harvard and Rossana Hu (b. 1968, Taiwan) from Princeton; they met while pursuing their undergraduate degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. Before establishing Neri&Hu in 2004 in Shanghai, a prolific, multidisciplinary practice with over 100 international architects and designers, the husband-and-wife partners worked for a decade at Michael Graves & Associates in Princeton. Among their most recognized works are The Waterhouse at South Bund in Shanghai, The Walled – Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat, and Suzhou Chapel. Apart from running an architectural practice and design studio the partners lead a retail store Design Republic and serve as creative directors of a furniture brand Stellar Works. The following is an excerpt from our candid conversation at their Shanghai office.

New York City now has three buildings by Steven Holl – Higgins Hall Insertion at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (2005), Campbell Sports Center for Columbia University in Upper Manhattan (2013), and Hunters Point Community Library in Long Island City, Queens that will open its doors to the public on September 24th. The event coincides with publishing Holl’s new book Compression with the Library’s abstracted image on its cover; it is the fifth volume of the architect’s written manifesto, 30-years-in-the-making series by Princeton Architectural Press. The new building, the size of the nearby landmarked Pepsi-Cola red neon sign, is a robust concrete parallelogram distinguished by softly outlined multi-story glazed cut-outs. It sits prominently on a new public promenade just feet away from the East River, directly across the United Nations complex in Midtown Manhattan and the southern tip of the Roosevelt Island with its Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park memorial by Louis Kahn. The new building is at once an iconic reference point, visible from Manhattan’s East Side and the ferries, and although it took nine years to finish, its completion is a positive sign of New York’s commitment to public projects being designed by our best architects.

To the uninitiated, Ricardo Bofill might come across as something of a chameleon. Comparing the post-modernism of his projects in Paris of the 1980s, his recent glass-and-steel towers, and the stark stoicism of his own home and studio which he renovated in the 1980s, one would be forgiven for thinking that there is no consistent thread present throughout his work. However, as Bofill reveals in this interview from Vladimir Belogolovsky’s 2016 “City of Ideas” series, his designs are actually rooted in concepts of regionalism and process which, while recently popular with the architectural community at large, have underpinned his architectural mind since his twenties.

Architect Giorgi Khmaladze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1982. After graduating from the Tbilisi State Academy of Art in 2002, he was accepted to AA in London but at that time he could not afford studying there. He remained in Georgia, working on his own projects, as well as taking part in various international architecture competitions. In 2010, Khmaladze became the first Georgian who was accepted to Harvard’s GSD on full scholarship, which was provided partially by the university and partially by the Georgian government. He graduated with Master’s in Architecture in 2012 and returned to his practice in Tbilisi. In 2014, his groundbreaking Gas Station/McDonald’s in Batumi won 2014 ArchDaily Building of the Year Award in Commercial Architecture. The architect’s other projects include Georgia National Pavilion at 2010 Shanghai Expo and Coffee Production Plant in Tbilisi. We met at the architect’s small office located at an attractive prismatic glass volume with a pronounced concrete exoskeleton to his own design. We discussed the architect’s intentions, inspirations, and that every one of his projects starts from scratch.