This is a series about architecture. It’s also a series about what we look for in architecture and how we judge it. Each essay is not just a meditation on the merits of a particular, perhaps surprising building, but on how we judge buildings. Not just what is important in architecture but the means by which we arrive at that importance. Austin Williams ignores the unprecedented opportunities that architects have been given to build in China since the turn of the century, and focuses on a modest middle school in the suburbs of Beijing. As he explains, the Chinese firm Atelier Fronti who designed it have tried with Baiziwan Middle School to make architecture relevant in a process which has very little regard for it.
For Tim Abrahams, One World Trade Center, is a much ignored or derided building by the cognoscenti, but it nonetheless produces something inspiring. Designed by David Childs, One WTC reconciles New York’s delirious art deco past with its monumental future. It proves, he argues, that architecture, unlike other art forms, can be present in our daily lives and is life-affirming proof that ‘the city has primarily itself as an end’ as Aldo Rossi said. Stephen Phelan has visited Onagawa several times since the Japanese Tsunami in 2011, charting its struggle to rebuild after the destruction. For him the temporary housing by the Pritzker Prize winning architect Shigeru Ban is a prism through which to consider Onagawa’s future.
Other writers will produce work for the series which will be compiled together in print in the future: all focused on one building, all focused on the mercurial way that architecture impacts our lives.
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