AD Classics presents you with some of the greatest buildings of the past that have influenced and shaped architecture today. Throughout ArchDaily's 13 years, more than 200 classics were published, and for this edition, we have rounded up the top 20 most visited Architecture Classics to date.
Museums reveal local and shared heritage. As cultural institutions embedded in the fabric of modern life, each museum serves as a window into history and human exchange. Made to promote understanding and provoke new ideas, these monumental buildings are inspired by spatial exploration. With some of the most influential museum projects in the world, Germany is home to a range of diverse institutions showcasing unique approaches to curating, taxonomy and spatial organization.
Polish-American architect, artist, professor, and set designer, Daniel Libeskind, founder of Studio Libeskind in 1989, believes that buildings are crafted with perceptible human energy, constructed with the intention to address the greater cultural context in which they are built. His commitment to expanding the scope of architecture reflects his profound interest and involvement in philosophy, art, literature, and music.
He addresses the notion of drawings being akin to a score, a piece of music that is interpreted by a like-minded community. Proportions, light, and materiality are all implicated in the drawing, and in this same way, buildings are also called to present space, atmosphere, and illuminate the practice.
Ricardo Bofill, the Spanish architect founder of Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA), designer of the iconic Walden 7 and more than 1,000 projects in forty countries, has passed away at 82 in Barcelona on Friday, January 14, as officially announced by his own firm through a statement.
After being shut down for more than a year, museums across the world are beginning to show signs of reopening. Most architecture and design events that were scheduled for 2020 have been pushed a year or two, depending on the severity of the pandemic in their respective regions. But while museums are open to the public once again, administrators have installed numerous precaution measures to ensure the safety of visitors and curators, and to avoid potential re-closures.
As international travels have been revived by government officials, and tourism is expected to recover gradually, read on to discover 18 museums and exhibitions that have begun welcoming visitors into their exhibition spaces as of May 2021, and the procedures required from the attendees before and during visitations.
Located on Montjuic hill in Barcelona and designed by the rationalist style architect Josep Lluis Sert, the Fundació Joan Miró (Joan Miró Foundation) is a unique space imagined by Miró with a dream of bringing art to the entire world.
The construction of this museum in 1975 was a major event in Barcelona because at the time there was a lack of cultural infrastructure in the city. Now 40 years have passed and the Foundation’s spaces host the work of Joan Miró as well as temporary exhibitions of emerging artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Walden 7 is a project implementing some of Ricardo Bofill's earliest ambitions and addressing most of the problems of modern city life. It is located on the same lot as Taller de Arquitectura, based in the refurbished ruins of an old cement factory. The housing structure benefits from Bofill's earlier research and the idea of providing public spaces and gardens for residents to enjoy an enhanced quality of living.
Architects are often bound by the will of their client, reluctantly sacrificing and compromising design choices in order to suit their needs. But what happens when architects become their own clients? When architects design for themselves, they have the potential to test their ideas freely, explore without creative restriction, and create spaces which wholly define who they are, how they design, and what they stand for. From iconic architect houses like the Gehry Residence in Santa Monica to private houses that double as a public-entry museum, here are 9 fascinating examples of how architects design when they only have themselves to answer to.
In March 1972, an article in The Architectural Review proclaimed that this structure was “probably the best building in Paris since Le Corbusier’s Cité de Refuge for the Salvation Army.”[1] The article was, of course, referring to Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s first project in Europe: the French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris, France, built between 1967 and 1980. Having worked with Le Corbusier on the 1952 United Nations Building in New York and recently finished the National Congress as well as additional iconic government buildings in Brasilia, Niemeyer was no stranger to the intimate relationship between architecture and political power.[2]
Located on a hill in Mauer, on the outskirts of Vienna, the Wotruba Church was the culmination of sculptor Fritz Wotruba’s life (the project’s architect, Fritz G. Mayr, is often forgotten). Constructed in the mid-1970s, Mayr completed the project one year after Wotruba’s death, enlarging the artist’s clay model to create a functional walk-in concrete sculpture. As can be seen in these images by Denis Esakov, the result is a chaotic brutalist ensemble that toys with the boundaries between art and architecture.
We look for materials which are as intelligent, versatile and complex as natural phenomena, in other words materials which don't just appeal to the eyes of the astounded art critic, but are also really efficient and appeal to all our senses.
– Jacques Herzog
Like several other works of architecture by Herzog & de Meuron the Forum Building, known since the 2012 relocation of Barcelona's Museu de les Ciències Naturals as the Museu Blau, is remarkable for its sensitive use of materials. A triangular mass of gray-blue concrete punctured and split in places to reveal the contrasting use of reflective planes, the building is a hard one to ignore, especially for an architectural photographer.
Ahead of the 125th anniversary of the birth of Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov, Photographer Denis Esakov provides a recent look at 12 of Melnikov’s projects—all of which have been standing for over 70 years. Enjoy this selection of photographs that show how some projects have aged, deteriorated or been adapted, and note Melnikov’s persistent fascination with the meeting of curvature and rectangularity.
Despite being one of the seminal works of modern Scandinavian architecture, Alvar Aalto’s Viipuri Library languished in relative obscurity for three-quarters of a century until its media breakthrough in late 2014. Its receipt of the World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize for a recent renovation was covered by news outlets around the world, bringing the 1935 building previously unseen levels of attention and scrutiny.
This renaissance is nothing less than extraordinary. Abandoned for over a decade and allowed to fall into complete disrepair, the building was once so forgotten that many believed it had actually been demolished. [1] For decades, architects studied Aalto’s project only in drawings and prewar black-and-white photographs, not knowing whether the original was still standing, and if it was, how it was being used. Its transformation from modern icon to deserted relic to architectural classic is a tale of political intrigue, warfare, and the perseverance of a dedicated few who saved the building from ruin.
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