Silent architectures

27Feb08

Renzo Piano (born in 1937) is an Italian architect.

The Beyeler Foundation (1997) with its museum in Riehen near Basel owns and oversees the art collection of Hildy and Ernst Beyeler that was built up by the couple over five decades and placed under the aegis of the foundation in 1982. By building Renzo Piano’s museum, the Beyeler Foundation made its collection permanently accessible to the public.

Peter Zumthor (born in 1943) is a Swiss architect. As his practice developed, Zumthor was able to incorporate his knowledge of materials into Modernist construction and detailing. His buildings explore the tactile and sensory qualities of spaces and materials while retaining a minimalist feel.

Therme Vals (1996) is the hotel/spa complex in Vals, built over the only thermal springs in the Graubünden canton in Switzerland.

Tadao Ando (born in 1941) is a Japanese architect whose approach to architecture was once categorised as Critical Regionalism. He works primarily in exposed cast-in-place concrete and is renowned for an exemplary craftsmanship which invokes a Japanese sense of materiality, junction and spatial narrative.

The Church on the Water (1988) is located in Tomamu, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.It is built in a clearing in a beech forest, and slopes down towards a small river. Hills surround the site to the west, and a resort hotel lies behind the church, to the east.

Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974) was an architect based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Kahn’s tends to the monumental and monolithic, heavy buildings that neither hide their weight, their materials, nor the way they are assembled.

Jonas Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, (1959-1965), was to be a campus composed of three main clusters: meeting and conference areas, living quarters, and laboratories. Only the laboratory cluster, consisting of two parallel blocks enclosing a water garden, was actually built. The two laboratory blocks frame a view of the Pacific Ocean, accentuated by a thin linear fountain that seems to reach for the horizon.  

    

 

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, who chose to be known as Le Corbusier (1887-1965), was a Swiss-born architect, designer, urbanist, writer and also painter, who is famous for his contributions to what now is called Modern Architecture.

The chapel at Ronchamp (1955) is singular in Corbusier’s oeuvre, in that it departs from his principles of standardisation and the machine aesthetic, giving in instead to a site-specific response.

Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799) was a visionary French neoclassical architect whose work greatly influenced contemporary architects and is still influential today.

This is the proposal for a cenotaph for the English scientist Isaac Newton (1784), which would have taken the form of a sphere 150 m high embedded in a circular base topped with cypress trees. Though the structure was never built, its design was engraved and circulated widely in professional circles. 

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