Table of contents for March - April 2018 in AZURE

Who is your all-time favourite design icon? ELIZABETH PAGLIACOLO Writer, “Amazing Concrete” (page 078) My all-time favourite designers are definitely the Eameses. They epitomize the ideal creative life – from their furniture to their futuristic concepts, from their films to their relationship, everything they worked on was thoughtful, heartfelt and important. What architectural photographer do you admire most? ALEX FRADKIN Photographer, “Winy Maas’s Excellent Chinese Adventure” (page 066) A former professor of mine, Henry Plummer, introduced me to the “poetics of light” when I was an architecture student. I learned from him that photography is not just a process of documentation, but a means to evoke emotion, a different way of observing and seeing. From that moment on, I was transfixed by the extraordinary symbiotic relationship of light, form, architecture…

_Surfacing You could call Matteo Brioni’s latest flooring surface half-baked and he likely wouldn’t mind a bit. Through the Lombardy studio he founded eight years ago, Brioni has been offering architects and designers an alternative to conventional tiling with his custom “raw earth” surfaces. His latest collection, TerraFrame, augments his usual soil bases with baked decorative elements to create a uniquely dual-toned and-textured material. The theme is “dichotomy,” says Brioni, whose inspiration was opus signinum flooring, made in ancient Rome by mixing small tile fragments with mortar. Born into a family that has owned a brick maker’s furnace in Gonzaga, about 140 kilometres southeast of Milan, for four generations, he came by his influences naturally. Marialaura Rossiello Irvine of Studio Irvine, a design firm in Milan, is Brioni’s art director.…

_Bathrooms Change room design embodies a paradox: Safely improving privacy requires radical transparency. Toronto firm MJMA takes this idea to an extreme with the UBC Aquatic Centre in Vancouver. Tasked with serving – sometimes simultaneously – swimmers who range from infants with caregivers to varsity and Olympic athletes in training, MJMA delivered a stunning, sculptural building that’s wide open to views – including of the change rooms. “It’s the most intimate part of somebody’s visit to an aquatic centre,” says Ted Watson, who led the project with partner Viktors Jaunkalns, in association with Mark Ostry of Acton Ostry Architects (AOA), on the University of British Columbia campus. “For a lot of people, it’s a make-or-break aspect of the design.” Aesthetics aside, what makes the aquatic centre notable is its adherence…

Boca del Río, a city south of Veracruz and a major port in Mexico, is in the midst of an urban revitalization. Home to the largest beaches in the region, the city of 138,000 is aiming to attract tourists and business travellers, luring them with a convention centre and a series of upscale hotels and commercial malls. Within this context emerges Foro Boca, a concert hall designed by Mexico City–based firm Rojkind Arquitectos (led by architect Michel Rojkind) – a studio responsible for a number of recent high-profile projects that include the remodelling of Mexico City’s national cinema centre, Cineteca Nacional. In 2014, Miguel Ángel Yunes Márquez, then-mayor of Boca del Río, tasked Rojkind and his team to create a permanent home for the Boca del Río Philharmonic Orchestra, which…

Roofing Tiles _1 Modern Manner Swisspearl’s contemporary-look 5th Façade is a large-format roof panel line sold in a variety of vibrant pigmentations and coated to protect against weathering and U.V. radiation. The fibre cement modules, produced from regenerative raw materials, are available in two sizes. swisspearl.com _2 Hard Wood Fine Metal Roof Tech combines the durability of metal with the look of wood in its new wood grain finishes, available as rectangular Quadro panels or diamond-shaped steel shingles. finemetalrooftech.com _3 Cool Hues DaVinci Roofscapes’ EcoBlend Colors (not shown) are engineered to reflect sun and heat, helping to alleviate cooling loads in residential or commercial buildings and to reduce heat island effect. The durable, fire-and impact-resistant polymer shakes and slate roof tiles are available in six nature-inspired colour blends. davinciroofscapes.com Solar…

_Leisure Center _Vancouver _Casper Mueller Kneer Architects If time is the new luxury, how do brick-and-mortar retailers convince people to spend more of it with them? By offering everything a shopper could want in a single location, says Mason Wu, co-founder of Leisure Center, a high-end concept space in Vancouver’s Yaletown neighbourhood. Offering upscale fashion and design, beauty and wellness products, art, books, private lounges and even a seminar space for community events (such as pop-up meditation sessions), the 1,860-square-metre store, which occupies two levels of a repurposed 1930 building, was envisioned as a place for consumers to spend not only their money but as much of their leisure time as they choose, explains Wu, who recruited Casper Mueller Kneer Architects to overhaul what was formerly a decorative-furnishings shop. CMK,…

_Office Politics Over the past year, a series of high-profile scandals has propelled the subject of workplace sexual harassment into the public eye. Referring to the lost contributions of women who have left or been forced out of just one field, television, writer Kater Gordon told The Guardian: “We are all paying a cost for harassment.” A cultural moment of self-reflection has followed, with other disciplines – including architecture and design – now being urged to examine the sexual power dynamics within their respective workforces. So how does the architectural profession stack up? According to a 2016 British survey of 1,152 female architects worldwide, 28 per cent had experienced sexual harassment on the job. Combined with those reporting discrimination or other victimization, the proportion of women affected reached a shocking…

_Pioneer Village Station _Toronto _aLL Design and IBI Group When the Jubilee subway extension opened in London in 1999, Tube riders were smitten. “You had curious tourists buying tickets and getting off at every station,” recalls Will Alsop, who designed the cathedral-like North Greenwich stop. A similar phenomenon occurred in December, when the Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension – to which Alsop’s London-based studio, aLL Design, contributed two station concepts – opened with much fanfare. The six-station, 8.6-kilometre stretch of rail, built at a cost of more than $3 billion, links the city’s northwest with the neighbouring suburb of Vaughan. “It’s nice that people are finding the Spadina line similarly fascinating,” says the architect. It stands to reason that they would. The Spadina extension is aesthetically ambitious, making it an outlier…

_Bathrooms In the home, bathrooms can be tailored to a user’s lifestyle or personal tastes. But how does the designer of a hotel accommodate the diverse people, personalities and comfort levels at play in a widely used space? That’s what Alessandro Munge, founder and principal of Toronto-based Studio Munge, contended with while contemplating the interiors for Bisha Hotel & Residences, a luxury development that opened last September in his home city’s downtown core. “Guests have very high expectations for the bathroom; it should always be an upgrade from their own home,” he notes. A residential bathroom, in other words, is very much connected to daily routine and should be highly functional. But with a bathroom for an upscale hotel, says Munge, “I can be much more conceptual and expressive with…

_Bathrooms Sonar by Patricia Urquiola Since launching its high-tech ceramic composite, SaphirKeramik, in 2013, Laufen has been collaborating with designers to test the material’s boundaries, both aesthetically and functionally. For her contribution, Sonar, Patricia Urquiola wanted to bring a three-dimensional aspect to the super-thin material. Taking cues from two disparate veins – architectural minimalism and sound waves – the collection of sinks, tubs and washstands features razor-thin lines, with some pieces defined by a rippled front that enriches their look. Creating a seamless look, the almost-invisible drains are slits that mimic the exterior profile. laufen.com Pure by Yonoh Working with Porcelanosa Krion for the first time, Clara del Portillo and Alex Selma of Spanish studio Yonoh were inspired by a basic element: water. Taking advantage of the mineral and resin…

In the coastal city of Tianjin, the idea of building a monument to books, and knowledge, is a challenging one – China is not a country known in modern times for celebrating the free flow of information. Designed by MVRDV of Rotterdam, in collaboration with local partners Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute (TUPDI), the Tianjin Binhai Library reaches for something ancient in imagining a library of the future. It’s a vast cave formed to house up to 1.2 million books within a five-storey-high stream of undulating shelving. A spherical auditorium at the centre watches over the 33,700-square-metre space like a luminous, all-seeing eye. This is a place to get physical with books, to crawl in and amongst them, and to let them overwhelm you. Working within a master plan…

One day in the fall of 2015, architecture critic Blair Kamin was reviewing the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects’ annual awards when he stopped short. That year, the jury had awarded honours to diverse projects from across the world – a soaring office tower in Shenzhen and a corporate headquarters in Munich; a natural history museum in Shanghai and a high-concept office called Spacecraft in Spain. As Kamin scrolled through the names, however, it was a local building that caught his eye. Built along the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago, El Centro is a satellite of Northeastern Illinois University. It’s a striking structure that the jury had praised for its “sculptural form and vibrant facade” and was a building Kamin knew well. He had reviewed it positively a…

_Chicago Architecture Biennial An art gallery covered in a chain-link veil. A canopy made from perforated aluminum. Dividing walls constructed from stretched gauze. Almost every one of SO-IL’s architectural projects is defined by an element of semi-transparency. Principal Florian Idenburg says it’s his interest in breaking down the barrier between walls and the outdoors that informs most of what he and partner Jing Liu have built since they started their New York practice in 2008. “We’re always aware of that threshold between exterior and interior,” he says. When Idenburg was invited to create something new for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, he naturally chose the leafy environs of Garfield Park Conservatory, where indoors and out already co-exist, as his site. He also teamed up with Serbian artist Ana Prvački to create…

_Customizing Parts Like many of her peers, Salomé Galjaard has spent the past few years investigating ways 3D printing can help create more efficient and diverse architectural forms. But while others are using the technology to form building components – and even entire structures – Galjaard is reconsidering digital fabrication’s role in the design process. In her latest research, the senior designer at international design and engineering firm Arup combines the newest 3D software with old-school manufacturing methods to economically produce complex structural parts on a bespoke level. As part of Arup’s Amsterdam team, Galjaard was working on a tensegrity structure that is part of a lighting system for a shopping strip in The Hague. The structure required a series of unique metal nodes (such as the one shown above)…

Situated at the foot of North Vancouver’s Lonsdale Avenue, the striking new home of the Presentation House Gallery, a well-known regional art space, is perhaps the most dramatic architectural gesture to be made on that stretch of British Columbia coastline since the opening of the Lonsdale Quay itself. Now called the Polygon Gallery, the building was designed by Patkau Architects (the husband-and-wife practice with a host of museum, library and other cultural projects under its belt) and is named after Polygon Homes (a property development firm and sponsor of the gallery). Appropriately enough, its inaugural exhibition, the magnificent show N. Vancouver, which runs through the end of April, consists of existing and commissioned works that ruminate on the shifting identity of the locale in which the building sits. For readers…

Privacy Hubs _1 Prospect These freestanding pods can be configured using four or eight acoustic panels and fitted with whiteboards, hooks, cups and media access. Materials Cast aluminum, baltic birch, polyester fibre Dimensions Panels from 61 x 79 to 87 x 147 cm Designer Richard Holbrook Manufacturer Herman Miller, hermanmiller.com _2 Q6 Lounge Series The high screen of this modular series – which includes benches, ottomans and tables – allows for the creation of single or dual-sided benches. Materials Screen, tubular steel, foam core, multiple fabric and leather options, or customer’s own material Dimensions Screen height from floor is 128 cm Designer Jonathan Prestwich Manufacturer Davis Furniture, davisfurniture.com _3 Pocket A personal den for productivity or a moment of respite, this chalice-like chair features a roomy compartment to tuck away…

And the winners are... The American Institute of Architects topped off 2017 with the announcement of several awards, including the 2018 Gold Medal, which went to New York architect James Stewart Polshek. Renowned for his socially conscious work, Polshek was responsible for the 1987 restoration of Carnegie Hall. The AIA also honoured Nebraska’s Tamara Eagle Bull, with the 2018 Whitney M. Young Jr. Award. Practicing for over 30 years, Eagle Bull was the first Native American woman to become a licensed architect in the U.S. and has been a tireless advocate for culturally responsible design. Other accolades went to Lenore M. Lucey and to Snow Kreilich Architects, which was named as the 2018 AIA Architecture Firm Award winner. Get the details at aia.org Caring Wood, by James Macdonald Wright and…