A Review of the Winners at the World Architecture Festival - part 1

A Review of the Winners at the World Architecture Festival - part 1 - Page 2

Saturday, 07 November 2009 05:43

Page 2 of 3

	Shopping Havaianas shop, Brazil by Isay Weinfeld, São Paulo, Brazil www.isayweinfeld.com
	The Havaianas Shop project responds very well to the street culture of a dense urban area. It is a bold building indicating a determined dedication to the contributions of Brazil to the Modern Movement. The shop has a significant urban existence- it connects two sides of the street with an elegant and accessible cover. This cover also has an opening to the sky letting in the light and rain, so that the shop has a micro climate of its own. It welcomes regular citizens for daily shopping for very simple footwear. Therefore it is popular and becomes a significant part of the urban tissue. Its elegance and simplicity are commendable.


	House Klein bottle house by McBride Charles Ryan, Melbourne, Australia www.mcbridecharlesryan.com.au
	The architects wanted to break free from the typical straight-angled housing enclosure. They wanted this holiday house to be more about fun, a break from the monotony daily routine. Rethinking the volumes in three dimensions, they stretched and distorted all the facets of the house, producing slopes and angles that create unique visual experience through spatial intersections, incidents and accidents. The result is a unique project where you would expect the unexpected. The architects explained the ideas behind their project quite well: The Klein bottle is a descriptive model of a surface developed by topological mathematicians. Klein bottle, mobius strips, boy surfaces, are unique surfaces that while they may be distorted remain topologically the same. I.e. a donut will remain topologically a donut if you twist and distort it, it will only change topologically if it is cut.


	Housing The Met, Bangkok by WOHA www.wohadesigns.com
	Housing as a category has a lot of criteria to take into consideration by judges. It could be rationality of the plan, the comfort of living, new typology, or presenting an additional public space to the city. For the Housing category jury this year the main criteria was the strong message that a building sends to other architects and other specialists in residential developments. That´s why from 13 shortlisted entries the jury chose the building that brought the most sharp and most detailed realised concept, and that has great potential for the future. That building is The Met in Bangkok by WOHA. The issue of residential highrise buildings is one of the most important in rapidly developing megalopolises, especially in Asia. The impact that they have on the city is enormous. For a long time this type of building was discredited by the modernist approach, which made a banal living box out of a beautiful dream. In the last decade a typical skyscraper was always designed as a superficial envelope of attractive shape, without answering basic questions posed by new standards of living in the 21st centrury.. In contrast, The Met by WOHA is an excellent attempt to open a skyscraper to the city and to allow its inhabitants to use the building as much as possible. A system of pass ways, sky-parks and swimming pools on upper levels forms a real vertical analogue of the city and creates a new quality of living. The wide use of greenery almost as an additional facede material is also an effective way to unite horizontal dimensions of the city with the verticality. The use of passive ways to save energy is also an important aspect of this project.