area 100 – changing cities

Issue number 100 of Area inevitably forces us to look inwards and backwards, to reflect on the history of the magazine, how it all began, or rather how the cultural…

art/architecture sell/inhabit classic/anti-classic planning/opportunity memory/invention built/built on existing tissue iconic/aniconic extraordinary/everyday  homogeneous/inhomogeneous built /voids Cities never cease to change. Constantly and inexorably, they keep changing because they are the stage of human…

The urban tissue, even if it is considered consolidated, is intrinsically inclined towards design, or in other words to a continuous transformation. This clearly applies to the empty areas created…

Café do Cais sits on the right margin of the Douro river in the Ribeira district of Oporto. It pretends to continue the logic of those provisional elements – Kiosks…

This part of Porto was still a city ‘’intact’’, OMA chose not to articulate the new concert hall as a segment of a small scale circular wall around the Rotunda…

In the Western civilization and especially in Europe the conflict between classical and anti-classical, or modernism, has more often than not resulted in the surrounding and suffocating of the former…

Founded by the Legionaries of Augustus in 24 B.C., Mérida became the most important Roman city in Spain at the end of the Empire. Today the presence of the Theater…

The site inspired a building of great formal simplicity whose image fit naturally between the nucleus formed by the historic Alcazaba fortress and the Roman bridge, on the one hand,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The new trade fair is located on the site of the former AGIP refinery at Rho-Pero, an area of over 2 million sqm that has recently been reclaimed, and close…

The empty areas left behind by the “wall” have triggered a long debate on the city and its design. Planners have proposed to build on the existing tissue, an ancient…

The Schützenstrasse block in Berlin, designed by Aldo Rossi, is one of the most authoritative examples and lessons on the importance of continuity, understood as a project’s ability to present…

In 1997 David Chipperfield Architects won an international competition for the restoration of Friedrich August Stüler’s Neues Museum, originally built between 1841/43 – 1859. Located on Museum Island in the…

Art and architecture have, in history, always been closely bound by a single urban destiny associated with the presence of monuments. Modernity, with its dogmatic goals defined for design, as…

In the late Nineties the city of Graz decided to found a new museum of contemporary art. After two competitions, launched in 1988 and 1998 respectively, which had not resulted…

A twist in the river, a node in the river, a circulation-route in the river. The node is an island; it’s a dome that twists into a bowl that twists…

With the recent Olympic games a series of striking buildings have been built: the new stadium, the new airport, the new public television headquarters (CCTV). The introverted Beijing, secluded in…

The National Stadium is situated on a gentle rise in the centre of the Olympic complex to the north of Beijing. Its location is predefined by the master plan. All…

In 1952, following the directives for cooperation between the Soviet Union and the new People’s Republic of China, the farming village of Dashanzi on the northeastern outskirts of Beijing was…

In the Japanese capital density is obviously an urban constant, but the exaltation of consumer goods, commerce and individuality has given rise, in the most popular downtown streets, to the development…

French Group Hermès chose the Ginza district, in the heart of Tokyo, for its Japanese headquarters, a 6000 square metres buildings of shopping space, workshops, offices, exhibition and multimedia areas,…

The Moriyama House consists of seven dwellings; one for the client and six freestanding apartment units. The plot is located in an attractive part of Tokyo where the traditional Japanese…

Dilemmas in the evolution of the city Without wanting to give a presentation that is in any way didactic or triumphalist, I would like to share with you a dilemma…