We are, I hope all familiar with The Pritzker Prize. It is architecture’s richest prize and I guess as result, considered its most prestigious. It is awarded each year by the Hyatt Foundation to an architect with a substantial body of consistently high quality work that upholds the highest values of design.

As such it seems a little strange that the official website so utterly, terribly, eye-puncturingly, horrifically designed? Don’t believe me? Let us have a look:

Click - Enter - to enter. Before you do though, note that the site was last updated in April 2006. Not as you may imagine, in say, 1997.

Awesome. Frames. So retro.
In order for you to gain a full appreciation of the site I have taken the liberty to point out a few of the more subtle features:

• 01. Times New Roman.
• 02. Pritzker Medallion draped over a piece of virtual blue marble.
• 03. Britannica Internet Guide Award. Whatever the hell that is.
• 04. Little ‘blue earth’ bullet points.
• 05. Paulo Mendes de Rocha looking like he wants to Punch You In The Face. Paradoxically, unlike this dude before him.
• 06. Information en Espanol? Uh-huh. Tick.
• 07. Tiled ‘Pritzker’ logo background. Particularly successful where the menu frame and the content frame misalign.

A quick look at the source code reveals that the site was made in Microsoft Frontpage, which begs the question - With a prize for US$100,000.00 given out each year why not spend a couple of bucks to get someone to design something that even remotely does justice to the work of the architects being awarded?

The chunky thin, wireframe contortions of Robert Owen.

Model for Axiom #1, 1999.

Symmetria, 2003

Carbon Copy #2, 2003

Vessel #2 (Blue), 2003

Ryue Nishizawa, occasionally of SANAA, has completed a house in the suburbs of Tokyo where every room of the house is a seperate building. Nishizawa - and his SANAA collaborator, Sejima - have explored the idea of fragmenting buildings into their constituent parts many times before, in their various housing studies and notably at the Kanazawa Museum of 21st Century Art.

The Moriyama House feels like the natural conclusion to these studies and presents a serious experiment on an alternate pattern of habitation.

Flung over the entire site, the boxes form a little community unto themselves. The spaces between the boxes and the street edge take on a public/private role as community gardens (presumably there is still much landscaping work to be done. But you never know.) and places of interaction between the client and thier lodgers.

So the house has becomes like a microcosm of a city; complete with towers, streets and parks.

From the architect’s description in El Croquis 121-122

“In this house, the client is given the freedom to decide which part of this cluster of rooms is to be used as a residence or as rental rooms. He may switch among the series of living and dining rooms or use several rooms at a time according to the season or other circumstances. The domain of the residence changes after his own life.”

Notionally however, the current occupation of the house seems to be:

A, B, C, D are occupied by the client. More specifically, A is bedrooms and a study, B the kitchen and pantry, C the living room and D the bathroom.

E is the maids quarters.

F,G+H, I, J are rental units of varying size.

The quest to make construction methods thinner and thinner in Tokyo to maximise area on insanely small parcels of land is well documented. In this instance there is a kind of absurd relationship between making the walls as wafer thin as possible by pre-fabricating the boxes out of plate steel - “dude, seriously, we must build this out of steel” - while recklessly discarding space to the public realm.

Fingers crossed that Nishizawa has discovered some kind of dirt-proof white paint…

All Photographs by Norimichi Kasamatsu. They appeared in Domus 888, p36-49.

I have no idea what this film is about - its all in French. But it certainly looks un rad.

If I was a DVD cover my blurb would read:

“Its Sin City meets Bladerunner meets Metropolis meets Waking Life”

Is this the latest indignity to be dealt on the grand Mosque of Cordoba? Converting it into a bathhouse? The French have no respect.

Anyone care to translate for us?

via The Art Life.

The other night a car mysteriously plummeted over the edge of The Gap under uncertain circumstances. Last week a retired chauffer was arrested in London to faces charges of throwing model Caroline Byrne over the same edge ten odd years ago. A little further south in Dover Heights and about forty five years ago, my grandmother brought up her five children in an unassuming bungalow that sat perched right on the cliff edge. One day a dog went over the side and their house was in the paper. The house has long since been renovated and subsumed by something larger and altogether more anonymous.

Now in the same position precisely one block further south, sits the Holman House by Durbach Block Architects.

The house is built out of a series of curves set in opposition to one another. A bent and split beam reaches out in an improbable cantilever to the north and south before folding in on itself to capture a small piece of outdoor space that steps down to the pool below. The time honoured parti of the flambouyant top sitting on a sturdy base is observed with the bedrooms bathrooms and etc bunkered in a stone base beneath the malformed clover.

Reminiscent of Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic, the house fliings itself over the edge and into the unknown. However, this time it is not held back by Leonardo di Caprio but by an equally hot core of service spaces.

Upper Floor Plan

Lower Floor Plan

The living spaces, both held back and flung out to sea by their languid curves, are the major events of the house. Telescopic full height windows pick out ocean territories to the north and south while the east is blinkered by a long horizontal strip window, defining the horizon.

Dover Heights is perhaps most remarkable for its anonymous suburban grid of housing sitting in one of the cities more picturesque settings - hardcore cliffs to the east and postcard views to the west. Greek Island it is not. A grid runs perpindicular from the ridgeline to the cliff, lined with houses that seem slightly embarrassed to be in such a position.

The Holman House on the other hand seems a naturally optimistic response to the cliff edge and it is not hard to imagine the type being repeated down the coast until the cliffs diminish at Bondi Beach. A kind of cantilevered, arcing, flying bastard revision of Santorini.

The top and bottom photos are mine, the rest, source here.

As linked to from here before, Glenn Murcutt with Wendy Lewin has designed a boutique hotel that is currently under construction along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. It has a blog! It has a website!

I was having a look around the website, taking in its dreamy slowly scrolling ’scapes, when I clicked on the ‘What Price?’ tab where it states that rates start at $3000 (US$2184.63) a night.

Me: “que?”

Three thousand dollars? And the minimum stay is two nights! They do claim to have a 7 x 7ft (porn compliant?) hand crafted bed; but even so. Thinking this to be a mistake, I sent the following to the management:

“Under the pricing section, it states that rates start at $3000 a night. Is this a mistake?
Regards,
Marcus”

And the response came back:

“Dear Marcus,

Thank you for taking the time to read the website. Regarding your question there is no mistake in the rate quoted. The lodge starts from Au$3000/night for two people valid until October through to march 2007 when the rates start from $3200/night.

Kind regards”

So it appears it is not a joke. And who knows maybe it will be worth it. However it got me thinking about whether or not this is the going rate to stay in accomodation desigend by Pritzker and/or Guru Architects. And so below is a woefully incomplete list of boutique accomodation. Note that in each case the most expensive option has been taken.

La Tourette by Le Corbusier. (Not technically a hotel but the closest Le Corbusier came). Crumbling Masterpiece. Approx 2×4.5ft beds. Light canons.
€20 (US$24)

The Hotel Puerta America Zaha Hadid Room. Gritty suburb of Madrid. Cool corridors. Is that the bed or the floor?
€171 (US$210.38)

Vals Therme by Peter Zumthor. Picturesque and secluded mountain village in Switzerland. Many baths at many temperatures, including but not limited to a Petal Pool and a Grotto reached by swimming through a stone tunnel. Outdoor accordian concerts at midnight. In the snow. The buffet breakfast delivered straight from some kind of grain and muesli based heaven.
€205 (US$251.82) For a double in the Zumthor designed rooms.

Benesse House by Tadao Ando. Picturesque and secluded island in the Inland Sea of Japan. Attached gallery with incredible collection of modern art. Attached village with incredible collection of art installations. Nearby gallery of built to house three gargantuan artworks. Arced concrete walls. James Bond Museum.
75,500Y (US$642.88) for a suite.

Aman Wella by Kerry Hill. Pretty Sri Lankin beaches. Coconut Grove. Colonial Charm.
US $800

Overwater Bungalow at Hotel Bora Bora presumably designed by some kind of Hospitality Algorithm. Overwater bungalow - the coolest room option evah.
US$950

Moonlight Head by Glenn Murcutt. Nice views. Nice bricks. Sawtooth roof.
A$3000 (US$2184.63)

And for those of you with the visual acumen here is a graph of my findings:

And so it is obvious that Moonlight Head is way off the scale. I am sure that it will provide some otherwordly service (minimally packaged local jams?) however if I had $6000
to spare and I had the choice between two nights in south Victoria or a flight to Europe and a weekend at La Tourette, I know which one I would choose.

If I have missed any hotels of note, let me know in the comments.

EMTB’s Headquarters for the Natural Gas Company in Barcelona is nearing completion. It a sinuous bendy tower genius thing that reads as The Compendium of All Miralles Shapes:

That is why we have
made a proposal
where the interest lies in
the fragmentation of the buildable volume into a series of constructions
that at the end form a unified volume…

From the architects statement.

The above photograph - and more like it - from here.

Ever since Corbu set out his ideas of an architecture and it was mistranslated as a new architecture, folk have been proposing that we move TOWARDS (!) all sorts of new things.

Top of my list of items I would consider writing a ground breaking treatise on would be:

“MO-Spline: Towards a New Moustache Driven Geometry; The Role of the Handlebar Moustache in Contemporary Shapemaking.”

or

“Towards a New Salary”

However I will leave the scholarly pursuits to others, and defer to the wealth of towarding that has already gone down. After some exhaustive research, I have put together an incomplete list of texts detailing conditions that have been deemed worthwhile to move towards.

Bear in mind that many of the entries below are out of print and are described by Amazon as being of ‘unknown binding’ and as such we do not appear to be in danger of colliding with any of them in the near future.

Lets start with the big guns, not the least of which is Mr Aalto:

Alvar Aalto: Towards a Human Modernism

Towards a symbolic architecture : the thematic house. By Charles Jencks

“Jencks’s Thematic House in London, a reworking of an 1840s townhouse, fulfills his view that modern architecture can embody personal symbolism. The entrance room, called the Cosmic Oval, is meant to suggest the Big Bang. On its walls, huge, fiery figures of Thomas Jefferson, Hannah Arendt and Pythagoras debate and ponder.”

Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. By Sanford Kwinter.

Finding Form : Towards an Architecture of the Minimal. By Frei Otto.

Toward a Scientific Architecture. By Yona Friedman and Cynthia Lang

The Architecture of Good Intentions: Towards a Possible Retrospect. Colin Rowe.

Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition. By Peter Eisenman.

Toward a New Regionalism: Environmental Architecture in the Pacific Northwest

Architecture and Identity: Towards a Global Eco-Culture.

Towards Sustainable Building.

Towards a New Museum

Lord knows, we are in need of a new museum - the old one is so full of lame non-tyranosaurus fossils and sarcophagi that there is nowhere to park the Prius.

Towards a New Kind of Living : The Werkbund Housing Estate Breslau 1929

Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics (Aesthetics Today)

Das Offene Haus: Fur Eine Neue Architektur /Open House: Towards a New Architecture

Utopia: Towards a New Toronto

I have been calling for a new Toronto for years. It is a tired, stale city. However, since the publication of Utopia: Towards a New Toronto in October of 2005, things have really begun to turn around - albeit slowly.

Community and privacy;: Toward a new architecture of humanism

Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage: Toward an Archaeology of Modernism

City form and natural process: Towards a new urban vernacular

Changing Architectural Education; Towards a New Professionalism

Towards a New Landscape.

This is totally needed. The current landscape old. And there’s too much water.

Japan Towards Totalscape: Contemporary Japanese Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape.

Toward the Livable City.

As many of us - I estimate the number to be well into double figures - currently live in cities, this essay feels somewhat redundant.

Sustainable Architecture: Towards a Diverse Built Environment

Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment

American Houses Today: The New Native House: Towards an Integral Architecture (New Southern Houses)

“Each of the 11 houses profiled is a treasure trove of references to old moments and modern visions. The soul of these buildings rises up from the southern landscape and moves forward to meet today’s demands for clean, efficient architecture. Each project invites an exploration of the handmade richness of an old barn intertwined within the steel and glass of a modern building.”

Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities . By Leonie Sandercock.

Towards Universality: Le Corbusier, Mies and De Stijl

Towards a Non-Oppressive Environment: An Essay (1972) It appears we are still towarding it.

Towards a Social Architecture : The Role of School Building in Post-War England

Towards post-modernism: Design since 1851. (1987) In need of a sequel.

Towards an Australian architecture. Do you mean corrugated iron and woolsheds?

Towards an Australian garden. Trust me, there are already gardens here.

In Search of Elegance: Towards an Architecture of Satisfaction

Behavioral architecture: Toward an accountable design process.

Towards a humane architecture.

Light-Tech: Towards a Light Architecture = Ausblick Auf Eine Leichte Architektur

The 1960s in Britain : Towards an Architectural Mainstream

Towards a History of Construction (Between Mechanics and Architecture). Why not just write the history?

Design Intervention: Toward a More Humane Architecture

Bruce Goff: Toward Absolute Architecture

Towards an experimental envirotecture

An essay toward architecture

Mega-Cities in the Tropics: Towards an Architectural Agenda for the Future

Reflections on span and space: Towards a theory of criticism of architectural structures (Con-text)

Towards tomorrow’s architecture: The triple approach . That’s right. The Triple Approach.

Towards a Green Architecture

And finally, not strictly architecture related, however it is the only work to rival Vers une Architecture in its prescient towardness:

Widening the circle: Towards a new vision for dance education : a report of the National Task Force on Dance Education.