In the End: Architecture / 50 Years of ARCH+ Project and Utopia

The district of Génicart, not far from the town center of Lormont, takes up only around 10 percent of the city’s total territory, but its 11,000 residents comprise nearly 50 percent of the overall population. Although, in recent years, many postwar modernist buildings in France have been torn down as a consequence of a state-sponsored incentive program, in this case the commune decided to retain certain social housing estates.

New forms of labor are conditioning new working environments. The increase in atypical and precarious labor conditions means that labor is being relocated from the conventional office environment to nomadic working environments like co-working spaces and the “home office.”

Nieuw-Bergen was missing a clear landmark, a structure to lend nobility to the main square and define a true center. The young town wasn’t built until after 1945, and lacked the classic church-tower silhouette that usually serves this function. The so-called Landmark building now plays a central role in the town’s broader plan to restructure the city center.

This apartment on Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter stands at the fork of two narrow streets, resulting in a distinctly acute-angled building. To make the building’s sharp form visible in the floor plan of the renovated piano nobile apartment, David Kohn’s first step was to gut all the interior cross walls. By retaining the stuccowork ceiling, however, he allowed the partitions of the original floor plan to remain visible.

As director of the 2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture, Alejandro Aravena asked the different national pavilions for “reports from the front” of contemporary architecture. The curators of the South Korean pavilion responded by exploring a frontline running right through the capital city of Seoul, where architects may think they have the vision of field generals, but are often asked to operate more like foot soldiers.

For Rotor’s Grindbakken project, the primary focus wasn’t on economic or environmental aspects of the materials cycle. Instead, this project to convert a dockside gravel pit in Ghent’s harbor area focused on the narrative qualities of an unremarkable industrial building.