Docomomo Journal
Not a member yet
547 research outputs found
Sort by
Expansion & Conflict: 13th International docomomo Conference - Seoul, Korea, 2014
No full textT!e 13th International docomomo Conference took place in Seoul, Korea, between 24 and 27 September 2014. Jong Soung Kimm, Chair of the 13th International docomomo Conference, explains that “after much soul-searching, ‘Expansion and Conflict’ was agreed as the theme by the organizers, and was presented at the Helsinki conference in 2012. Jong Soung stresses that “the keyword in the theme is ‘conflict’, and that word at one point was put forward as the lead of the catch phrase. Not as a pejorative word, “conflict” was used as a challenge to invoke a critical dialogue about the diasporas of the Modern Movement: how it has extended and taken root in various cultures and generations as well as how there has been conflict, if any, during this process, as explains Tae Woo Kim, Chair of docomomo Korea
Eleventh docomomo Council Meeting: August 26, 2010, Mexico City, Mexico
Get PDFAna Tostões, Chair of docomomo International, welcomed all representatives and audi- tors to the 11th docomomo International Council Meeting. She asked Hubert–Jan Henket, honorary president, to say some words in remembrance of Dennis Sharp. Next to an image of the “architect, scholar, critic, writer, teacher, bookseller, cook and walking encyclopedia” dancing in the tango competition at the 4th International docomomo confer- ence in Sliac, Slovakia, he finished his tribute with Dennis’ words: “While I breathe, I hope.
MATTI SUURONEN’S ‘FUTURO’ - PROTOTYPE 1968 AFTER 50 YEARS
Get PDFThe Futuro house was designed in 1968 by the Finnish architect Matti Suuronen. Its prototype, Futuro no. 000, currently in the collection of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, underwent a major conservation treatment at the time of its acquisition a decade ago. The construction, the architectural details and the surface of fiberglass reinforced polyester (GRP) elements had suffered from transport and handling during the many assemblies on various sites, indoors and outdoors, over the previous decades. Before starting the restoration a research project was set-up to investigate the options for conservation. A clear vision about the best ways to exhibit the prototype was developed in order to avoid further deterioration. The decision to only exhibit the Futuro within the museum was essential for its conservation treatment. In contrast with the original function of the mass-produced Futuro houses as summer houses or ski-huts, it proves to be the best option to preserve the unique prototype for the future
The New Deal Infrastructure of New York: The Hospitals of Isadore Rosenfield
No full textIn New York, the New Deal saw the construction of a new breed of hospitals under the direction of Isadore Rosenfield (1893-1980). Though quasi-unknown today, his contribution to the field of hospital design cannot be overstated in terms of the quantity of facilities he built on four continents and the philosophy underlying his activities as an architect, planner and educator. Currently, though, even his most successful buildings are being demolished or converted without documentation. The author examines the context and some issues encountered in his photographic recording of these facilities and looks at their potential considering today’s larger challenges
Spanish Pantheon in Rome. A Permanent Abode
Get PDFThe Spanish Pantheon in the Campo di Verano was entrusted to three resident artists at the Academy of Spain in Rome in 1957: architects José María García de Paredes (1924-1990) and Javier Carvajal (1926-2013) and sculptor Joaquín García Donaire (1926-2003). They proposed an open space devoid of religious symbols apart from the chapels around it. This work explores a new direction that moves away from the usual funerary monument: a symbolic space composed of two planes in equilibrium laid out on a smooth platform where there is no distinction between sculpture and architecture. This place is for those who take time to pause here, a permanent abode, to spend time with the absent and the present
Kollektivhus: the Swedish model
Get PDFToday there is a new wave of co-housing internationally. Co-housing is here understood as collaborative housing, based on collaboration between residents on cooking and house maintenance, a new phenomenon since the 1980s. Sweden has a tradition since early modernism of kollektivhus, collective houses, in multi-family dwellings with employed staff managing household work. In Sweden today there are only some 40 true kollektivhus or co-housing projects, while ordinary Swedish postwar multi-family dwellings have common facilities that potentially would make them co-housing. Co-housing is often seen as a sustainable house form, but a problem is that they mainly reach middle-class residents
The Delcourt House: the last house by Richard Neutra
Get PDFThe only French building by the architect Richard Neutra (1892-1970), Delcourt house, built in Croix near Roubaix, France, is frequently forgotten in publications on his work, and is generally considered to be of little significance in the largely American career of its designer. At the end of the 1960s, Marcel Delcourt (1923-2016), a young Chief Executive Officer at the head of the mail order company Les Trois Suisses, was attracted to the American way of life. As the final work of Richard Neutra, the Delcourt residence is a fragile heritage, the result of complex and fruitful exchanges between Europe and the United States of America (USA), between architects and the client, but also between the customized design of most of the features and the use of sophisticated techniques, products that the interior finish industry was able to supply at the end of the 1960s. The edifice now stands as a repository of domestic architecture techniques
Demedicalize Architecture
Get PDFNiccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) long ago observed, “In the order of things it is found that one never seeks to avoid one inconvenience without running into another; but prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the qualities of inconveniences, and in picking the less bad as good.” Given these complex conditions of engagement, it is critical that the relationship between architecture and health be revised. While perhaps partly responsible, architecture is not always capable of providing positive solutions for the environment or the “sick” body. Instead, a confused and anxious contemporary architecture struggles to produce new manifestations that avoid exalting the spectacle of capital of the last twenty years. While architecture is looking once again into the ambiguous political, cultural, moral, and, above all, social ideas of health and medicalization for both justification and a new mandate, it should seek to challenge – rather than pacify – the newly emerging neo-liberal agenda and question a medicalized vision and approach toward health issues
Alfred Preis and Viennese Modernism in Hawai‘i
Get PDFPreis, who was a Viennese émigré and refugee architect with no early experience designing for tropical climates, went on to become one of the most prolific mid-century regionalist and modernist Hawai‘i designers. Although he is best known for his award-winning design for the USS Arizona Memorial (1962) - one of the ships infamously sunk in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Pries’s earlier institutional and residential commissions are arguably his most compelling. His Viennese roots directly influenced Pries’s approach to design in Hawai‘i. By engaging numerous precedents from Vienna, he eventually forged a novel idiom for Hawai‘i domestic design. This article will examine the interiors of two of Preis’s more than 100 single-family houses – the Scudder Residence (now the Scudder-Gillmar Residence) (1939-1940) and the Dr. Edward and Elsie Lau Residence (1951) – in order to highlight some of the ways in which Preis transported Viennese modern design ideas of the first three decades of the 20th century some 7,616 miles from Austria into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. His interior designs for these houses evidence strong relationships with the ideas of earlier Viennese modernists about spatial planning, the aesthetic uses of materials, furnishings, and color. Perhaps more than any other influence, Preis’s Vienna experience culminated in modern architecture that was as sensorially pleasurable as Hawai‘i itself