Form: The Latest Architecture and News

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

In the post-pandemic era, an oversupply of underutilized churches is a growing reality. Besides offering explorations in adaptive reuse, what does this trend say about modern spirituality? Have humans lost interest in the sacred? In a recent article on Common Edge, Duo Dickinson addressed this concern by claiming that "the cultural change that is causing the abandonment of churches does not end the human search for the sacred."

While correctly stating that no formula can turn architecture into "the holy," he seemed to indicate that a new spirituality might still be found in architectural form. As we consider what changing forms of sacred space mean for the modern era, looking for a revitalization of spirituality through architecture alone risks a repeat of an error made in the last century: expecting too much of aesthetics.

In 2017, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) unveiled its designs for a project in central Copenhagen. The project features an urban IKEA store, a budget-friendly hotel, and residential apartments connected by green spaces. As a significant part of the development, BIG designed two high-rise residential towers known as “KaKtus Towers,” which are linked by a raised public park connecting them. Both towers, with the tallest at 80 meters high, are scheduled to be completed in 2024. A recently released new set of images showcases BIG’s development nearing completion.

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Discussions of architectural form demonstrate how disability is negatively imprinted into the field of architecture. In architectural theory and the history of architecture, “form” typically refers to the physical essence and shape of a work of architecture. In the modern idea of form, it is a quality that arises from the activity of design and in ways that can be transmitted into the perceptions of a beholder of architecture. Form provides a link between an architect’s physical creations and the aesthetic reception of these works. It occupies a central place within a general understanding of architecture: the idea of the architect as “form-giver,” among many other turns of phrase, conveys the sense of some fundamental activity and aesthetic role of form within architecture, what architects create, and how people perceive works of architecture.

A recent exhibition at the MAK Vienna - Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, is showcasing the works of Sagmeister & Walsh, a NYC-based design firm investigating what makes beauty so appealing.

Titled "Beauty," the exhibition explores the notion that beauty operates as an independent function, and that in itself, it can be the primary motive for architecture: form is a function. In collaboration with the YouTube channel and design studio Kurzgesagt (In A Nutshell), this video released along with the exhibition explains why beautiful things make us happy.

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From city master plans to pocket-sized products, Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) have explored architectural formalism through innovative digital design methods. In 2006, the collaboration with furniture-makers and fashion houses led to the creation of Zaha Hadid Design that served both as an iterative process for and a resultant of ongoing architectural design.

A pop-up exhibition, located suitably on the ground floor of ZHA's renowned condominium along the High Line in New York City, features a scale model of the building itself on display. To honor and present the work produced by the firm in the last four decades, the Zaha Hadid Gallery showcases a series of projects in a wide range of mediums including the six 'Silver Models' that represent eight of the firm's key works.

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Videos

Architecture, Form, and Energy is a documentary series featuring 6 interviews with architects and intellectuals from the United Kingdom, United States, Malaysia, and Mexico. The series seeks to disseminate information that inspires contemporary architectural evolution, from the impact of climate on a place, finding inspiration in nature, the relationship between form and energy, selecting the right materials, and appropriate technological application.

Dutch journalist Peter Veenendaal has completed a website that features all 136 built works by modernist Willem Marinus Dudok. Dudok, who was formally trained as an engineer, has been hailed as one of the Netherlands’ most influential architects, boasting a prolific career beginning with military barracks and encompassing numerous municipal buildings throughout Europe. Influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, Dudok is remembered for his form-driven modernism, leaving his legacy in the work of later architects from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

Veenendaal has dedicated a substantial portion of his career to documenting Dudok’s work, including a documentary of his most significant projects entitled “City of Light.” Continue on to Veenendaal’s new website here to explore Dudok’s full portfolio.

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Formlessfinder of New York City has a vision "to liberate architecture from the constraints of form." Samuel Medina of Metropolis Magazine recently interviewed the Princeton duo on contemporary architectural practice - fittingly naming them "Formal Renegades."

“We like architecture,” says Garrett Ricciardi, with real sincerity. “We want to save architecture.” But from what? Ricciardi is one half of New York–based formlessfinder, the experimental—you might say radical—architecture firm he founded with Julian Rose in 2011, just after the pair completed a joint thesis at Princeton University. Their project, which laid out the blueprint for Ricciardi and Rose’s subsequent collaborations, advanced a daring proposition: to liberate architecture from the constraints of form.

“The basic idea of the formless is about freeing up architecture to make it about what we want it to be about,” Rose says. “The idea is that form has sort of gotten in the way,” he adds, before checking off a laundry list of offenders: parametricism, digital fabrication, blobs, minimalism. Where form has “always served to limit and control,” the formless, as the architects have come to define it, is subversive by nature. It’s an operation rife with uncertainty, producing “messy, equivocal, and, most importantly, generative” results.