Arch. Myriam B. Mahiques Curriculum Vitae

Friday, January 11, 2013

Buildings as a disguise -out of the ¨architecture¨ category-

Heidi Weber Museum. Centre Le Corbusier

The Centre Le Corbusier is a great example of an ideology. Beautiful in its plasticity, no need for decoration, or extra ¨twists.¨ 
Sometimes, architects carry the label of their buildings. They design them as stamps, that can be built anywhere in the world, for any society. Absurd.
Sometimes, the buildings are so literal in their ¨main idea,¨ what we used to call ¨la idea rectora,¨ that they do not show architecture any more. They are just a scenography of the ridicule. 
My husband says that I shouldn´t promote those type of examples, but I remember one of my students, in her first year of architectural design, she liked Gehry´s metaphor of the guitar, and she designed a building with the shape of a guitar. Being her a junior,  it was very difficult for me to explain why she shouldn´t work like this. 
So, this post is dedicated to students. And I hope with these few words and pictures they could understand that not all buildings belong to the category of ¨architecture,¨ but ¨construction¨ instead.


¨This photo, lifted from the Tumblr Chaz Hutton, depicts seven New York City architects decked out for the 1931 Beaux-Arts costume ball as the buildings they designed. From left to right: A Stewart Walker as the Fuller Building, Leonard Schultze as the Waldorf-Astoria, Ely Jacques Kahn as the Squibb Building, William Van Alen as the Chrysler, Ralph Walker as 1 Wall Street, DE Ward as the Metropolitan Tower, and Joseph H. Freelander as the Museum of New York.¨ From 


Photo via Flavorwire.  ¨Also in China, land of architectural craziness it is,  this Piano House, masterminded a few years ago by Hefei University of Technology architecture students to house plans for the new Shannan district in Huainan City and bring notoriety to the region.¨ From:


¨Dubbed “Galije” and located on a parcel of untouched coastline land, the resort is envisioned as a way to combine exclusivity with a responsible, sustainable embedding of the structure in its surrounding landscape. “The split/limbo we found ourselves in was to design an iconic exclusive luxury resort in projecting total of 100,000 library program that should be invisible. An exclusive residence under cover. As a result we designed the whole project as an offset to the terrain and covered it with a blanket of the original landscape. Where a higher density was needed we lift the blanket to create a hill. The iconic hotel is formed by pulling the blanket in front of the cliff to create a even more dramatic overhang. The more flat parts of the landscape hold the villa’s organized around their private patios facing the sea,” From 
Building Disguised As A Building.Oxford Street, London. By Bob Comics

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