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Architecture and the Architects
British architect Tony Fretton, whose work includes the Lisson Gallery, London (1992), The Red House, London (2001) and the British Embassy in Warsaw (2010), has been compared to the Viennese master Adolf Loos for his thoughtful approach and meticulously crafted interiors.
In this talk, Fretton discusses his approach to architecture, which he traces back to an early interest in performance art, and describes his experience with two recent projects in Belgium: Deinze Town Hall and Westkaai Towers, Antwerp.
He also touches on his earlier projects, which include the refurbishment of Camden Arts Centre, London (2004) and a new house (The Red House) for the sculptor Anish Kapoor in Chelsea, London (2008).
CD-ROM / 2018 / 39 minutes
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Amanda Levete's early success was with Future Systems, the practice she ran in partnership with her then-husband the late Jan Kaplicky. Future System's most notable work included Selfridges department store in Birmingham (2003), and the Stirling Prize-winning Media Centre at Lord's Cricket Ground in London. Since founding AL_A in 2009, Levete has gone on to design the MAAT - The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon (2016), Central Embassy, a luxury shopping mall and hotel in Bangkok (2017), the London headquarters building for Sky (2016) and her most significant project to date, Exhibition Road Quarter at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2017).
In this talk, Levete discusses the V&A project. She describes the technical challenge of building a new subterranean gallery below the existing building; her success in persuading English Heritage to allow her to open up the Grade I listed Aston Webb screen to create a new entrance; a more fluid relationship between the museum and the street; her novel use of ceramic tiles to pave the new courtyard, and other devices designed to visibly express aspects of the project that might otherwise have remained concealed.
CD-ROM / 2018 / 39 minutes
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Philadelphia-based practice KieranTimberlake beat the world's leading architects in the competition for the new US Embassy in London. Completed in 2017, it replaces the famous 1960 Eero Saarinen building in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair.
In this talk, founding partner James Timberlake explores how the new building reflects America's democratic values - transparency, openness, and equality - while still meeting the need for heightened security. He discusses the complex construction challenges; the environmental measures employed, including a facade made of laminated glass with an outer envelope of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE); and the hostile reaction from incoming President Donald Trump to the Embassy's relocation to South London's Nine Elms, an area undergoing intense redevelopment.
CD-ROM / 2018 / 36 minutes
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Odile Decq first came to prominence in 1990 with the completion of Banque Populaire de L'Ouest in Rennes, designed with her late husband and partner Benoit Cornette. In recent years, she has completed the extension to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (2010), The Phantom Restaurant at the Opera Garnier in Paris (2011), FRAC Bretagne Contemporary Art Museum in Rennes (2012), the renovation of Antti Lovag's bubble house Maison Bernard in France (2016) and Le Cargo office space for tech start-ups in Paris (2016). In 2016, she was awarded the Jane Drew prize for women in architecture.
In this talk, Decq describes setting up her own school of architecture in 2012, the Confluence Institute, housed in a converted railway building in Lyon. With its emphasis on making, the school offers a radical alternative to conventional architectural education.
CD-ROM / 2017 / 17 minutes
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Leading French architect Dominique Perrault moved onto the world stage with the completion of the French National Library in 1989. With a portfolio that spans major public buildings, apartment blocks, hotels, offices and master plans, his design for an Olympic Village helped Paris win its bid for the 2024 Games.
In this talk, Dominique Perrault discusses his new campus centre for Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. Challenging the client's competition brief, he blended the building into the landscape to connect the campus to the city and create a new public park and, inadvertently, a space for political protest. As Perrault explains, his design for Ewha grew out of his ongoing interest in underground architecture which began with the French National Library.
CD-ROM / 2017 / 46 minutes
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Odile Decq first came to prominence in 1990 with the completion of Banque Populaire de L'Ouest in Rennes, designed with her late husband and partner Benoit Cornette. In recent years, she has completed the extension to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (2010), The Phantom Restaurant at the Opera Garnier in Paris (2011), FRAC Bretagne Contemporary Art Museum in Rennes (2012), the renovation of Antti Lovag's bubble house Maison Bernard in France (2016) and Le Cargo office space for tech start-ups in Paris (2016). In 2016, she was awarded the Jane Drew prize for women in architecture.
In this talk, Decq discusses her Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark Museum in Nanjing China (2014). Inspired by the way bondage accentuates the curves of the female body, she designed a building that responds to and exaggerates the existing landscape with a central atrium that varies floor to floor to challenge the prescriptive circulation of traditional museums.
CD-ROM / 2017 / 20 minutes
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Julia Barfield founded Marks Barfield Architects (MBA) in 1989 with her late husband David Marks. After losing an ideas competition for a monument for the new millennium, the pair turned entrepreneur and set out to build it themselves. The result was the London Eye, and international fame for MBA.
Here, Barfield discusses MBA's 2015 project for a primary school for the University Of Cambridge. Drawing on extensive research, the design facilitates the latest thinking in primary school teaching methods. With spaces clustered around a central courtyard, it features an open "learning street", a covered external canopy, and artwork that reflects the school's international outlook.
CD-ROM / 2017 / 37 minutes
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Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton set up Sauerbruch Hutton in 1989, now based in Berlin. Their best known buildings include the GSW Headquarters in Berlin, for which they were nominated for the Stirling Prize in 2000.
In this talk they focus on the Federal Environment Agency in Dessau, completed in 2005. With its mix of low-tech materials and high-tech production processes, the building was designed to showcase the best in sustainable architecture.
Hutton and Sauerbruch describe the development of the building's curvilinear plan along the route of an old railway line, and their use of colour, a constant in their work; how any sustainable building is only as efficient as the people who inhabit it; and how a concern for environmental efficiency has been a running thread through their work, from their Photonics Centre Berlin in 1998, through Museum Brandhorst, 2008, Munich Re, 2014, and the soon to be completed M9 Museum in Venice-Metre.
DVD-ROM / 2016 / 51 minutes
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Israeli-born Ron Arad is a prolific designer whose output spans buildings, furniture and sculpture. Perhaps his best known work, the Design Museum in Holon, Israel, has become a symbol for the city. His recent projects include a cancer treatment centre, an upside down tower and the interior makeover of the famous Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC.
In this talk, Ron Arad discusses training at the Architectural Association during the 1970s, his first success with the iconic 1981 Rover Chair, current architecture and design projects, and the freedom that comes from embracing many disciplines.
CD-ROM / 2016 / 37 minutes
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Norman Foster is one of the world's pre-eminent architects. With his practice Foster + Partners, Lord Foster has designed every possible building type and worked in every corner of the globe, picking up numerous awards and accolades along the way.
For his recently completed winery for Chateau Margaux, Lord Foster drew on the local vernacular to create a different addition to the famous estate. In this talk he discusses why he became so personally involved with the project, about combining recycled materials with cutting edge technology, and his client's delight at the new building's understated boldness.
DVD-ROM / 2015
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Graham Stirk is a senior partner at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, having first joined the practice in 1983 when it was titled the Richard Rogers Partnership. As principal architect on buildings that include the office scheme 88 Wood Street, the luxury residential building One Hyde Park, two airports and a winery, he helps steer the design direction of the practice.
Here Stirk discusses The Leadenhall Building - a speculative office tower in London's financial district. The tower is inclined along the south side to avoid blocking a key view of St Paul's Cathedral, with core services housed in a vertical "cassette" on the north side. The concept of distinct served and servant spaces, borrowed from Louis Kahn, recurs throughout the work of the practice. Stirk also explores the challenges of building across the street from the Lloyd's Register of Shipping - the first building he worked on after graduation and, in contrast to Leadenhall, one of the most bespoke office buildings on the planet - and explains the 11 year lag between commission and completion.
CD-ROM / 2015 / 40 minutes
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American-born Charles Jencks is a landscape architect, theorist and critic best known for his Garden of Cosmic Speculation, near Dumfries, Scotland, and his writings on post-modernism. He has designed landscapes projects around the world, including Parco Portello in Milan, Northumberlandia near Newcastle, England and Wu Chi at the Olympic Forest Park in Beijing. Jencks is also co-founder of the Maggie's Centres - a series of cancer care centres designed by leading modern architects, named in honour of his late wife Maggie Keswick.
In this talk, Jencks discusses his recent project Holding The Eco-Line, a landscape design for the Suncheon Bay Expo in 2013. He explains the development of the design, and his Korean hosts' reaction to it, as well as the importance of symbolism in his work. He also discusses his latest creation the Crawick Multiverse, inspired by cutting edge theories of the origin of the universe.
DVD-ROM / 2015 / 39 minutes
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Martha Schwartz first came to prominence with her Boston bagel garden - a radical manifesto for a more artful approach to landscape design. Her recent projects include Dublin Docklands Grand Canal Square in Dublin, Mesa Arts Centre in Arizona and Jacob Javits Convention Center Plaza, New York.
In this talk, she describes her project Fengming Mountain Park in the Chinese city Chongqing for a major Chinese developer. The project is a rectangular section cut through a large construction site, designed to showcase the sales centre for a series of forthcoming residential towers. Building on the idea of zigzagging movement of water down a mountain, she has created a processional route across the site, marked by a series of monumental orange cut-steel structures - like origami mountains on legs - that glow at night.
This is a truly exciting time to be working in China, she says, with construction taking place on an epic scale and developers just beginning to appreciate landscape architecture as art-form.
CD-ROM / 2014 / 48 minutes
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Keith Bradley is senior partner at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studio, based in Bath, UK. Bradley led FCBS's best known work, the Stirling Prize-winning Accordia Housing Project in Cambridge. He's also worked on major urban regeneration schemes, public museums, galleries and academic buildings.
In this talk, Bradley explores FCBS's Manchester School Of Art extension building, completed in April 2013. He discusses the evolution of the design, which includes a vertical gallery space where students can showcase their work, an interactive hybrid studio intended to foster creative collaboration between students from different disciplines and triple height columns with a relief cast decorative detail inspired by the textiles of Lewis Day, who taught at the school a century ago. Manchester School Of Art was shortlisted for the 2014 Stirling Prize.
CD-ROM / 2014 / 37 minutes
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Australian-born Rod Sheard is senior principal of leading sports architects Populous. Following early experiments with stadium design at the John Smith's Stadium in Huddersfield, Sheard's firm went on to win the competition for Sydney's 2000 Olympic ANZ Stadium. Since then, the firm has built a portfolio of international sports buildings including London's Wembley Stadium, the Yankees ballpark in New York, Nationals Park in Washington DC, Ascot Racecourse in Berkshire, England, the London 2012 Olympic Stadium and the forthcoming Qatar World Cup Stadium.
In this talk, Sheard compares the experience of designing the Sydney and London Olympic Stadiums, and explores how his firm has led the way in the evolution of sports venues into the complex, quality buildings they are today.
DVD-ROM / 2014 / 45 minutes
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Alistair McAlpine started working for the family building firm Sir Robert McAlpine at the age of sixteen. After his first job on Howard Robinson's Shell Centre on London's South Bank, he want on to work with many of the pre-eminent architects of the post war era: Denis Lasdun, Basil Spence and YRM. His close relationship with Cedric Price spanned many decades, until the latter's death in 2003.
In this talk, McAlpine recalls being summoned by Lasdun during building of the National Theatre and his attempt to matchmake Price with Richard Seifert. He discusses commissioning Classical architect Quinlan Terry to design a series of follies for his personal estate, and his concerns about the current London building boom.
CD-ROM / 2013 / 31 minutes
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Brian Henderson spent the greater part of his career as a partner with YRM. The firm, founded by F.R.S. Yorke, Eugene Rosenberg and Cyril Mardall, was responsible for many institutional buildings of the post war period: schools and universities, power stations and airports.
Henderson talks about his early experience working for Basil Spence on the Festival of Britain; his major buildings for YRM, including the Sizewell B nuclear power station in Suffolk; and the more unusual projects he was involved with, such as the Michelin Building for Paul Hamlyn and Terence Conrad, and YRM's own offices in Britten Street.
This talk was recording at Brian Henderson's home in Wiltshire.
CD-ROM / 2013 / 44 minutes
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Professor Neil Spiller is dean of the school of architecture at Greenwich University. Before moving to Greenwich in September 2010, he was vice-dean at the Bartlett school of architecture, where he founded AVATAR, the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Group.
In this talk, Spiller describes his 14-year long Communicating Vessels project - an architectural paracosm set on an island in Kent. His designs for the island - which include a walled garden in memory of the American theorist Lebbeus Woods - draw on the work of the Surrealists, science fiction and technological advances such as nanotechnology and augmented reality.
CD-ROM / 2013 / 34 minutes
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James Gowan, best known for the Leicester University Engineering Building, which he designed along with James Stirling, talks here about his life and work. Now in his eighties, Gowan recalls his training at the Glasgow school of art, his early career in London where he met Geoffrey and Philip Powell, his collaboration with Stirling, and the tensions that forced him to go his own way, just as the pair were coming to prominence.
Gowan's interest in social housing began with Ham Common - the project which launched his partnership with Stirling - and continued with schemes at Creek Road and Trafalgar Road in Greenwich, London. Other buildings include the Schreiber House in Hampstead, London and the latest addition to his Humanitas Hospital, Milan. Still influenced by his Beaux Arts training, Gowan believes he is an architect in the gothic, as opposed to the classical, tradition.
CD-ROM / 2013 / 41 minutes
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Architectural historian Iain Borden is Vice-Dean at the Bartlett School Of Architecture. His work focuses less on architecture with a capital A, than on everyday spaces and buildings, from bus benches and bill boards to food stalls in Japan.
In this talk, Borden discusses urban space as a social product. Applying the theoretical approach of Henri Lefebvre, he explores how different people experience the city, focusing on skateboarders, car drivers and the French film-maker Jacques Tati.
CD-ROM / 2013 / 45 minutes
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Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi is one of India's foremost architects. Best known for his low cost housing schemes, the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, and the Centre for Environmental Planning Technology in his native Ahmedabad, Doshi helped shape modern Indian architecture.
In this update to a 1980 interview with the late Monica Pidgeon, Doshi explores the two great influences on his work: his early mentor Le Corbusier, whose Indian buildings he helped realise, and his roots in India. The construction of his studio Sangath, in the Northern Indian city Ahmedabad, where this talk was recorded, marked a turning point in his career at the age of 50, when these two strands came together.
CD-ROM / 2013
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Michael Arad won the 2003 competition to design the World Trade Centre memorial over more than 5,000 other entries. Born in Israel in 1969, Arad was living in New York City on 9/11. His scheme for the memorial, which began as a personal project in the days and weeks following the World Trade Centre attacks, was based on an image of two vast voids in the Hudson river, reflecting the absence of the demolished towers. The project, which took seven years to complete and was beset by politics and conflict, opened in September 2011 to critical acclaim.
In this talk, Arad, a principle at Handel Architects, describes his ambitions for the project, his determination to protect his original vision in the face of conflicting expectations, and the challenge of winning such a high profile commission so early in his career.
CD-ROM / 2012
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Michael Webb is one of the founder members of the Archigram Group, and was perhaps best known for his "Bowellist" designs for a furniture factory in High Wickham.
In this talk he discusses the evolution of his architectural approach, his relationship with the rest of the Archigram team, and why he gave up practising.
CD-ROM / 2012 / 52 minutes
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Chip Lord was a member of radical architecture collective Ant Farm, which he formed with Doug Michels in 1968. The pair were later joined by Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier.
In this talk, Lord describes the group's major projects, from the early inflatables to the bubble-like House of the Century, Cadillac Ranch, a comment on American consumerist aspirations, and the provocative re-enactment of the Kennedy assassination, Eternal Frame.
The group broke up in 1978 after a fire destroyed their San Francisco warehouse. After falling out of fashion for several decades, Ant Farm's work is now gaining fresh attention.
CD-ROM / 2012 / 49 minutes
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American architect Steven Holl trained at the University of Washington and the Architectural Association, London. He set up his own practice Steven Holl Architects in New York City in 1976. His work includes the Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland (1998), Simmons Hall at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2002) and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York City (a collaboration with the artist Vito Acconci, 1993).
His more recent projects reflect an interest in a phenomenological approach to architecture. In this talk he discusses three buildings: The Bloch addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (2007), his much-praised mixed-use Linked Hybrid complex in Beijing China (2009), and the Horizontal Skyscraper, officially titled the Vanke Center in Shenzhen, China (2009).
CD-ROM / 2011 / 29 minutes
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Moshe Safdie was born in the Palestinian city of Haifa in 1938, moving to Montreal with his family at the age of 15. Success came early when his student thesis project was accepted as the principle exhibit in the 1967 Expo in Montreal. Habitat '67, an innovative stacked housing system, remains his most famous building, despite the many prestige commissions that have followed.
In this talk, he traces his career from Habitat '67 to the present day. As well as important projects in Israel, including the Yad Vashem Museum and the city of Modi'in, he has completed a string of cultural buildings in Canada and the USA, from the Quebec Museum of Civilization to the recently completed United States Institute of Peace in Washington DC. Much of his work is now large-scale housing projects in the Far East.
CD-ROM / 2011 / 34 minutes
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Moshe Safdie was born in the Palestinian city of Haifa in 1938, moving to Montreal with his family at the age of 15. Success came early when his student thesis project was accepted as the principle exhibit in the 1967 Expo in Montreal. Habitat '67, an innovative stacked housing system, remains his most famous building, despite the many prestige commissions that have followed.
In this talk, Moshe Safdie discusses Marina Bay Sands - a massive casino complex in Singapore that consists of three towers topped by a daring cantilevered Sky Park, a low-rise conference centre and a museum building inspired by a lotus flower. Marina Bay is Safdie's attempt to humanise a mega-scale project and weave it into the existing urban fabric.
CD-ROM / 2011 / 20 minutes
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2010 AIA Gold Medalist Peter Bohlin looks back over his career, from his breakthrough project, a house for his parents, and the dozens of houses that followed, to the Apple retail stores that have now brought him international recognition.
CD-ROM / 2011 / 36 minutes
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Charles Renfro joined Diller and Scofidio, founded by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, in 1997. Since Renfro became a partner in 2004, the firm has been known as Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The practice first gained attention for its site-specific, landscape and multi-media work, most notably the Blur Building, a pavilion at the 2002 Swiss Expo. It completed its first major building, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, in 2006. The renovation of the High Line, a formerly disused elevated railway line running along the west side of Manhattan, has become a much loved addition to the city since it opened in summer 2009. The second phase of the High Line opened in summer 2011.
In this talk, Renfro discusses the firm's interventions at the Lincoln Center arts complex in Manhattan's Upper West Side. He discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the original campus, designed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by America's leading architects of the time, and outlines Diller Scofidio + Renfro's approach to the refurbishment. He details the various phases of the project, which include opening up the Julliard music school and the Alice Tully concert hall, reworking Dan Kiley's landscape scheme for the North Plaza, and re-energising the Lincoln Center's front entrance, Robertson Plaza.
CD-ROM / 2011 / 38 minutes
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John Johansen (born 1916) is best known for his Oklahoma Theatre Centre - inspiration for both Richard Rogers and Frank Gehry - his US Embassy building in Dublin, and his series of symbolic houses.
Here aged 93, in his third talk for P D, he looks back over his career, from studying under Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, to starting out in New Canaan, Connecticut as a member of the Harvard Five and providing John F Kennedy with one of his most famous lines. His exploration of futuristic building technologies is now focused on nanoarchitecture, which he dubs a new species of architecture.
CD-ROM / 2010
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Michael Sorkin is the founder of Sorkin Studio based in New York City. His recent projects include the planning and design of an environmentally sensitive 5000-unit community in Penang, Malaysia, masterplans for sites in Hamburg and Leipzig as well as a plan for a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. Architecture critic for the Village Voice for ten years, he is currently a contributing editor to Architectural Record and author of numerous books including "Variations On A Theme Park", "Exquisite Corpse" and "Indefensible Space".
In this talk he discusses his latest book "Twenty Minutes In Manhattan" - a personal reflection on fifteen years of social and physical change in his home city - how cities might change in the future and his speculative environmental design work through his non-profit Terreform.
CD-ROM / 2010 / 47 minutes
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Michael Wilford, unsupported by his father in his choice of career, had to train the hard way, at North London Polytechnic evening school while working by day for various architectural practices. By good fortune, one of these was Stirling & Gowan who had just won Leicester University Engineering School competition. Later, when Stirling & Gowan split up, Wilford was invited to rejoin the practice and later became a partner.
Michael Wilford, as the former partner of the late James Stirling, inherited the design project for the beautiful new bus station/railway station for Bilbao in northern Spain. At the point when Stirling died, the contract for a second version of the scheme had just been signed. Now, a third version, developed further by the new partnership Michael Wilford & Partners, has been agreed; and it is this version which Wilford describes.
In it the aim is to contribute something to the city generally, to reinforce and intensify the activity of the central area. The new building reconnects the old and new parts of the city. It contains a bus station and two railway systems (at two different levels) with, sandwiched between, a public area for waiting, ticketing and shopping; plus a World Trade Centre, offices and public housing.
CD-ROM / 1995 / 43 minutes
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John Thompson qualified as an architect in 1971, and is a partner in the London practice Hunt Thompson. He became increasingly aware, while working in the public sector for local authorities and housing associations, that he and his colleagues were losing touch with their real clients, the ultimate users of the buildings. He describes in this talk how they overcame this problem, by getting to know these people and their needs and working with them, learning to understand the complex relationship between the physical and the social environment.
The first of their experiences in this field was between 1980 and 1983, at Lea View House, a former slum clearance estate in North London which had fallen into disrepair. The transformation which they wrought, working with the people on the estate, has been widely praised and led to other large inner city projects. They instituted a rolling programme of new build and demolition, moving tenants into new blocks from the ones to be demolished.
Thompson also describes large-scale urban projects that his firm has been involved in. He is convinced that architects must get involved in the whole process of the way buildings are created, so as to provide an environment in which buildings and the people that will use them are in harmony.
CD-ROM / 1992 / 30 minutes
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