After several near misses in some recent high profile competitions, Aalto Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Lima Museum of Contemporary Art, SMAR Architecture Studio (Madrid/Western Australia) was rewarded with the commission for the Science Island project in Kuanas, Lithuania. Against some stiff competition from 144 competitors from around the world in that events initial, open stage, SMAR, together with two other finalists, were selected to refine their schemes in a second stage.
SMAR’s approach to the design challenge for this site was in marked contrast to its two finalist competitors—SimpsonHaugh and Partners (London/Manchester, U.K.) and Donghua Chen Team (Beijing, China). Whereas SMAR proposed a large tilted disc as the entrance to a museum embedded in the park, the other two teams each suggested large commanding structures. Although they obviously carried out the functional requirements of the brief, in the end they presented a somewhat antithetical approach to the park idea.*
SMAR’s more subtle approach, with the disc as significant arrival symbol, caught the favor of the jury from the very beginning. The words of SMAR principal, Fernando Jerez, summed up their strategy in a nutshell with the question: WHY ANOTHER BUILDING?”
According to the SMAR narrative, “The Island has already one building, the Zalguiris Arena. What if, instead of designing a new building, the proposal follows what is already there, (the guidelines of the site) to find a natural connection with nature—with Nemunas Island? The proposal takes advantage of the natural slope and the different topographical levels of the island. Following the main road that crosses the island from the Zalguiris Arena east to west. The New Nemunas Island Museum will take advantage of the natural slope that already exists.”
In the second, development phase of the competition, SMAR’s elimination of the basement to reduce the cost of the project did not alter the visual impact of their building enough to raise doubts in the minds of the community. It is still the design that squarely places the park idea in the forefront.
Because of a recent statement by the professional adviser, Malcolm Reading, we now know that SMAR was a clear jury favorite from the very beginning. To some locals, this may at first have seemed a rather unusual solution to the project. But after living with it for a short period, it would have become clear to the community that this was a clear and logical solution.
Detroit’s Dia Plaza competition is hardly unique in initiating a search for urbanistic solutions to a cultural cluster. Vienna, Berlin, Mesa, Fort Worth, Chicago’s Millennium Park and Paris’ Parc de la Villette are just a few examples of projects where the focus on spaces between buildings, and arriving at a connective plan to infuse new energy into the site, has been the primary goal of other projects. All of these have been faced with their own challenges: solutions for some have been relatively simple—Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Berlin’s Forum—while others such as Paris’ La Villette and Mesa’s Downtown Plaza represent a more challenging subject spatially. In the case of Detroit, the aim of the competition was clear: “The design competition centers around enhancing and enlivening the DIA’s exterior campus and aims to connect all the institutions with a beautiful series of settings that support all types of programming and public art.”
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.
Milton Keynes, known simply as MK, represented one of the more significant results of the UK’s “new town” programs from the 1950s and 60s. Situated almost equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge, and within easy access from London, the city had everything one might expect from a modern community—except a university. For a city having a population exceeding 250,000, and projected to have 500,000 inhabitants by 2050, that will all change, as a competition supported by the MK Council (MKC) and Cranfield University has resulted in five firms competing for the opportunity to design a higher educational institution to eventually accommodate 15,000 students.
If cities in the U.S. are anticipating funding from government entities to solve a dire need for affordable housing, they should be prepared for a long wait. The national government, a traditional source of funds for such projects, has shown little if no interest in the issue, and state and local sources are at a minimum. To exacerbate the problem, the construction cost of affordable housing has risen exponentially the the past few decades. Gone are those days when architects such as Oakland-based Michael Pyatok could build affordable housing for $100 a square foot.
The Rails to Trails program, which gained momentum after the1984 Federal Land Banking Law—supported by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy—has seen over 24,000 miles of trails established where rail lines once existed. Some sites were strictly urban, while others, sometimes over 100 miles in length, were primarily rural, while others combined some of both.
The reunification of Germany in 1989 not only had a great impact on the lives of many Germans, especially those living in the former DDR,but together with the decision to move the nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin resulted in two major international design competitions in 1992: the first was to convert the existing Reichstag building into a home for the German parliament, the second being the Spreebogen planning competition, which included a chancellery for the head of state as well as needed buildings nearby for the Federal government.
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