Architecture book spotlights 1,037 notable buildings

Source : Business Times - 25 Dec 2008

The large-format Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture (Phaidon Press, 800 pages, US$195) spotlights 1,037 notable buildings completed worldwide by superstar architects and regional talents since January 2000. Innovative projects in Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America and Oceania are shown in 4,600 colour photos, 2,100 line drawings and concise textual summaries.

The structures include expensive single homes in exotic locales and high-rise offices and apartments in major cities. Airports, stadiums, hotels, railway stations, embassies, museums, galleries, libraries and schools are also depicted. Unusual profiles, ingenious engineering and high functionality are much in evidence.

More than 60 maps and statistical charts from the London School of Economics summarise global trends in architecture, and easy-to-read indexes on the projects and architects are helpful in navigating the wealth of material.

Hefty at 6.6 kg, the atlas comes with a plastic carrier to aid portability.

How were projects chosen? In the two-year compilation, 10,000 new millennium buildings worldwide were proposed by regional teams of curators, writers, teachers and architects, who could endorse their own work. Then, an unnamed ‘panel of expert advisers’ guided the London publisher’s final selections.

Almost half the projects - 476 buildings - are located in Europe, including 52 in the United Kingdom, 45 in Switzerland, 39 in Spain and 38 in Germany.

Two European firms - Foster & Partners of London and Herzog & de Meuron of Basel, Switzerland - have the most buildings in the atlas, 10 apiece. London alone has 22 projects, including Foster’s US$1.7 billion Wembley Stadium.

Regional bias in the book’s selections? Not according to Phaidon editorial director Emilia Terragni, who said that it accurately reflects where the most variety and innovation are occurring in global architecture. One in six projects in the atlas were executed by an architect foreign to the site, the book notes.

The United States has the most projects with 95. These include the groundbreaking Seattle Central Library, by the Rem Koolhaas-led Office of Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam and New York’s REX firm; 14 flat-roofed units of affordable housing in Aspen, Colorado, by Peter Gluck of New York; the industrial-influenced Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis by France’s Jean Nouvel; and The New York Times skyscraper in Manhattan by Italy’s Renzo Piano.

Japan has 91 buildings represented, from the low-slung Fuji kindergarten and the Mikimoto Ginza 2 Retail space in Tokyo to the glass-walled Ring House in Nagano Prefecture.

China’s 41 projects include the Bird’s Nest National Stadium and the Watercube National Swimming Center built for the 2008 Olympics. Australia’s 40 projects include the Southern Cross Station with its undulating roof in Melbourne and an array of modernistic villas perched on seaside cliffs.

The contrasts are striking. Diebedo Francis Kere, the first from his African village to study abroad, returned to Burkina Faso to design a US$46,437 brick primary school with an elevated roof that allows cooling air to flow across classroom ceilings.

At the high end is Santiago Calatrava’s 54-storey Turning Torso Tower in Malmo, Sweden, 147 apartments above 10 floors of offices in a graceful spiral landmark overlooking the harbour.