Up against the wall

Donald Trump has dredged up a lot of dumb ideas in his efforts to lose the US Presidential election. One of the more worst has got to be his great wall of Mexico. Still, every cloud. The Mexican architecture/design firm Estudio 3.14 took the wall and ran with it Barragan style. You can see our photos of  Luis Barragan’s Home/studio in  Mexico City here and his Cuadra San Cristobal stables here on OTNARCHITECTURE. While you’re at it, check out Alec Baldwin taking Trump apart and Clinton and Trump performing the Dirty Dancing duet. Well, kinda.

If you build them….

Ever wondered what a full-sized ocean liner might look like inside a building? If that’s the sort of thing you crave, head over to OTNARCHITECTURE where we have put up some new buildings, including Zaha Hadid’s Library and Learning Centre in Vienna. There are also a couple of modernist masterpieces: Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Villa Tugendhat that was built between 1928 and 1930 in Brno in the Czech Republic and Adolf Loos’s 1930 Villa Müller in Prague. Plus we got a look at the more recent Dancing House in Prague, a collaboration between the Croatian–Czech architect Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry from 1996.

Images: top left, Villa Tugendhat and right, Villa Müller. Bottom left, Dancing House and right, the Library and Learning Centre University of Economics in Vienna

Church news

A couple of years ago we posted on Ernst Plischke's St Mary's church in Taihape. Each time we've driven up the hill hoping to get inside it's been closed but a few Sundays ago we got lucky (ok for church people finding one open on a Sunday might not seem all that lucky, but still). Although it has been claimed that the ‘building’s spaciousness reminds one of the immensity of God and the universe’ you'd need quite a bit of religion to get there although it is certainly spacious. Plischke travelled in Europe before starting on his design and came back with visions of St Peter's Basilica in Taihape. The commissioners were somewhat alarmed and in the end a standard basilica format was settled on. The large uncluttered interior remains impressive and the starkness is amplified by the light from circular windows high on each of the walls. A large ceramic crucifix that could only have been made in the fifties was the work of Martin Roestenburg. He also made the giant statue of Our Lady of Lourdes overlooking Paraparaumu. It was Roestenburg who commissioned from Europe it seems the 14 paintings for the stations of the cross. They are surprisingly muscular and direct renditions of the well known story. Here on OTN:ARCHITECTURE we've put up all our photographs of the building inside and out along with a selection of the paintings. If you can tell us who the Stations' painter was we’d be interested to hear from you. The signature looks like N Frey.

This way

You can see why architects get their buildings photographed before the owners move in. Once they're in, all bets are off. It's the old form v function conundrum. Anything that’s not completely fit for purpose is subjected to taped notices (this way), cordoned off areas (stay out) and weird additions (where are we going to put Harry?).  Two exceptionally beautiful buildings we have just seen illustrate the problem perfectly, and a third one solves it. 

It would be hard to beat the art museum that Shigeru Ban designed for the town of Oita in the south of Japan … until you see the art. This is a building in a city that doesn’t really know what to do with it. Despite the high flown rhetoric on the website ('a playground for the heart'), the current exhibition of a local calligraphy competition fills two of three floors. This leaves the large international works commissioned for the opening looking a wee bit out of place. At the moment one is already off for repairs so there is a lot of empty space. 

Tadao Ando’s Awaji Yumebutai Conference Centre gets an even harder time from its users. Ando created a complex series of interconnected spaces and gardens but they're subverted by pasted notices, instructions, advertisements, stanchions, chains, shop paraphernalia and Harry’s office. The monumentality of Ando’s forms just hold their own but it's a relief to look out to the horizon. 

But then, not far away, is another Ando building, the Buddhist water temple (Honpukuji, Hompuki). The deeply metaphoric forms, reflective ponds and subterranean shrine all inhabit the values of the people who use it. Beneath a bisected lily pond a place for meditation and prayer is encased in red lacquered timber. Not a handwritten notice to be seen. Everything that needs to be done in this place is taken care of by the architecture and its community. If architects had to revisit their buildings and see how they were actually being used, their profession would change forever.

You can see pictures of Ando's Water Temple here, his conference centre here and Shigeru Ban's art museum here on OTNARCHITECTURE

Images: the residents leave their mark on Ando's conference centre and bottom, 'Harry's' office

A great art museum building from Shigeru Ban

The Oita prefectural art museum in southern Japan, a couple of hours by train from Fukuoka, has got to be one of the most beautiful art museums in the world. Designed by Shigeru Ban, the same architect who designed Christchurch’s cardboard cathedral, it shares some of that building’s signature elements but then expands and develops them. This is a large light box so beautifully measured and detailed that just walking around the exterior is a revelation in the use of design and materials. And then a wonderful interior with clear zones of different functions that work closely together visually. The effect is you always know exactly where you are and with a very good idea of why. Connect all this with a graceful atrium and what you get is an invitation to explore further rather than the shock and awe of so many recent museum entrances. You can see our photographs of the building inside and out here on OTN: ARCHITECTURE

Another brick in the wall

More up on OTNARCHITECTURE today. A couple of anon entries (a sailors shrine in Gozo and a brickworks in Bangladesh), well someone made them but we couldn’t find out who they were. Then there is the V C Morris shop designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in San Fransisco the only building he made there and a precursor to the Guggenheim, Louis Kahn’s masterpiece the Parliament building in Bangladesh’s capita Dhaka and the strange utopian city Acrosanti deep in the desert designed by Paolo Soleri.