Bilbao planning/opportunity
Many contemporary cities take advantage of important cultural and sportive events to obtain funds in order to achieve large-scale urban transformations. However, these opportunities can only be exploited in a constructive way in the presence of an exis …
Bilbao planning/opportunity – Campo Volantin Bridge
The footbridge on the Rìa di Bilbao represents a continuation of the Calle Ercilla from the city center; it connects the Uribitarte commercial area, in disuse, with the banks of the Campo de Volantin river. It is a kind of suspended flyover which cross …
Bilbao planning/opportunity – Guggenheim Museum
Bilbao can witness a strategic resort to certain prestigious names of international architecture: the city subway planned by Norman Foster, the airport by Santiago Calatrava presently under construction, the new general town plan entrusted to Cesar Pel …
Barcelona extraordinary/everyday
A city made wholly of monuments, of extraordinary and amazing structures would obviously be impossible to live in, because it would be hostile to everyday life. At the same time a city completely focused on ordinariness may be anonymous and inhospitabl …
Barcelona extraordinary/everyday – Agbar Tower
It is no tower or skyscraper in the American sense of the term: it is a unique object that emerges from the center of a quite calm city. But it is not a slender, nervous vertical line, like an arrow or like the belfries that generally project from hori …
Amsterdam homogeneous/inhomogeneous
The demands for housing and urban transformations often call for large-scale projects which are superimposed on an urban tissue that is usually more minute, fragmented by hundreds of years of subdivision of the land into plots. Large homogeneous comple …
Amsterdam homogeneous/inhomogeneous – Residential Housing KNSM – Eiland
It is seldom in our western cities that an architect has the possibility of implementing his ideas without resistance. The structures in which political decision-making is embedded and the committees which assume the role of the client are all geared t …
Amsterdam homogeneous/inhomogeneous – Silodam
Along a jetty in the Amsterdam Y–river a mixed programme of 160 houses, offices, work spaces, commercial spaces and public spaces has been squeezed into a tight urban envelope. These elements involved four different clients: a housing developer, a hous …
Milan memory/invention
The “Velasca tower”, a building that symbolizes a thought that is impenitently pursued by its author, has in the Twentieth century marked a virtual break with the dogmas of Modernism and its supposedly anti-historical character, reconnecting the evolut …
Milan memory/invention – Università Luigi Bocconi
We saw this brief as an opportunity for the Luigi Bocconi University to make a space at the scale of the city. To this end we have built at the scale of the site, 50 m x150 m. Inside, our building is thought of as a large market hall, directly influenc …