Architecture in the service of the state can be a powerful tool. It lets a faceless bureaucracy present itself as a real thing. It can make ideals and memories into concrete facts. And it is usually big. A recent competition for a new National Museum in the small country of Estonia shows the potential and pitfalls of such a national architecture. While it can define the state, what does that mean when the state as a concept is a difficult idea these days? Now that true power lies not only with multinationals, but also with trans-national organizations like the European Union, of which Estonia has been a member since 2004, what is the state? Moreover, what history does a country that was only independent between 1925 and 1941, and then again since 1991, really have as such? What future can it imagine for itself? What is there left for architecture to represent?
The answer, if we can believe the results of the recent Estonian National Museum Competition, whose winner was announced this spring, is that architecture can use place above all else for meaning. This means not just utilizing the site in terms of its geography and geology, but also looking at, preserving and focusing on the full range of uses to which that site has been put, as well as the larger implications –both physically and conceptually—that a site might have. Everything human beings have done with a place, everything they have built there, and every association they have with a site as part of a much larger whole is the basic material the architect can use to design a construction that will bring out all of this history and all of these latent associations. The winning design in this competition, “Memory Field,” submitted by a multinational group of architects Dan Dorell and Lina Ghotmeh from Paris, and Tsuyoshi Tane from London, certainly accomplished this expression of place with a clear and simple proposal.
The site for the Estonian National Museum is not, as one might expect, in Estonia’s charming capital, Tallinn, but in the second largest city, Tartu. Located a few hours to the East of the seaside capital, almost on the border with Russia, Tartu is an industrial and trading node at the edge of the vast planes of pine forests and tundra that stretch from here to Siberia. It was on the outskirts of Tartu, in an 18th century manor house, that local agitators for defining a national identity by preserving local culture conceived the museum before there was even a country. In 1909 they began collecting “Finno-Ugric” (as the local population is called) artifacts and displaying them to show citizens that there were traditions of which they should be proud. Clothing, implements and especially lacework all showed the culture of a rapidly disappearing peasant population. Later, films documenting those peoples also joined the collections.
During the Second World War, the Museum moved to downtown Tartu, and it wasn’t until recently that the decision was made to reoccupy the former site. In the meantime, a large Russian airbase, now abandoned, took over much of the area, and its disused landing strip points directly at the site’s core, while the ruins of the military complex dwarf the remains of the former manor estate. A small lake provides a bucolic counterpoint to this rather bleak collection of artifacts. “This is the frozen edge of Europe,” says Winy Maas, who was part of the competition jury; “it is where you have a collection of incredible textiles dating back to the 14th century, but it will be housed on a site where wolves roam. You are really between worlds, and we thought the most important thing was to define that condition.”
The updating and modernization of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport has been well overdue. Aside from occasional problems caused by Chicago’s winter storms, congestion at the airport has led air travelers to avoid the airport when catching a connecting flight is on the agenda. So Chicago, noted for its modern architecture and the home of several high-profile architecture firms, decided to turn to an invited competition for a solution to these issues.
Competitions in Chicago in the recent past have been anything but encouraging, especially when transparency is an issue. During the competition for the Obama Center on the South Side, the Obama Foundation, which was responsible for the administration of that “competition,” was anything but a model of transparency; and to this day, none of the finalist designs, other than that of the winner, have seen the light of day. In the case of the O’Hare project, videos submitted by the five finalists teams were on public display, and the public was even asked to vote for their favorite.
Form and Dichroic Light Scott Hall at Carnegie Mellon University Michelle LaFoe and Isaac Campbell OFFICE 52 Architecture Forward by Cesar Pelli, FAIA Introduction by Michael J. Crosbie, FAIA Leete”s Island Books, Maine USA Hard cover; 96 pages in color ISBN 9780918172709
In his introduction to Form and Dichroic LIght, Michael Crosbie never mentions the term, “wild card,” to describe Office 52’s participation in the invited competition for the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Building. The four finalists, picked from a list of 17 firms, also included three household names: ZGF, Wilson, and BCJ (Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson). So what possible chance could a firm, which had just recently opened a small office in Portland, Oregon, have against a competition lineup of this magnitude? But as OFFICE 52 Principal, Isaac Campbell explained, as a small firm, “we were quite nimble,” and the $50,000 stipend the firms all received to produce a design could allow OFFICE 52 more time to undertake the research involved than might be the case with a larger office, where a cost controller is constantly focusing on the operation.
In these times when political emotions run high and gun violence is the norm, not the exception; and when emotions no longer are held in check, but encouraged by our leaders, minorities become easy targets for those who adhere to ideologies based primarily on exclusivity and hate.
The LGBT community has long been the target of various segments of our society; but the massacre that took place at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a favorite hangout for gays, elevated this phenomenon to a new level. After an event that claimed the lives of 49 victims, injured 68 others, and left hundreds permanently traumatized, it should come as no surprise that a memorial to this tragedy has been front and center in the minds of the community ever since. Because the very nature of this event has drawn nationwide attention, the community wanted to get it right. So it was only logical that they would turn to a competition as the most viable vehicle for arriving at a solution for the design of a memorial, as well as a museum. For this, the onePULSE Foundation was formed, to memorialize this tragedy and “ensure that Pulse”s legacy of love, acceptance and hope will never be lost.”
As part of a policy to relocate archives of local interest outside of major Bavarian cities, a competition was staged for the design of a new archive in Kitzingen, 12 miles from the provincial capital city of Würzburg, Germany. The competition was open to qualified teams in the EU, with 25 firms identified to take part in a competition. Since five firms were preinvited, 20 openings were available for the 79 applicants that vied for participation in the competition. In the end, 23 firms submitted designs for the final adjudication process.
In July 2019 the Vilnius Concert Hall competition jury began its deliberations to identify a suitable design for this major performing arts project. As one might have anticipated, two of thejurors on the seven member panel, Ole Gustavsen (Snohetta) and Andreas Cukrowicz (Nachbaur Architekten) had won high profile competitions for similar music center projects—in Oslo and Munich.The jury was confronted with a formidable task, as the competition, organized according to UIA regulations and anonymous in its format, had attracted 248 entries from around the world. For this one-stage competition, the organizers listed the following evaluation criteria, whereby the order of the criteria was not to reflect any priority:
Memorials to commemorate atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II have taken many forms. Holocaust museums such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. by Pei Cobb Freed or the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, all endeavor to paint a broad picture, including narratives covering most of the major events and sites. Former concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau, Theresienstadt and Buchenwald have been frequent tour destinations. In the case of Buchenwald, the local city of Weimar has placed pictures of “Witnesses” throughout the downtown area as a reminder of the Nazi legacy.
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