MCHAP THE AMERI CAS
29 MOBILITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE 89 PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ENDEAVORS 143 ENCYCLOPEDIC STORAGE 201 TOOLBOXES 253 CULT AND TERRITORY 315 DENSITIES 363 ENCOUNTERS
9 THE AMERICAS: A WONDERFUL WORLD Wiel Arets 21
WHAT’S IN A NAME? Fabrizio Gallanti
MOBILITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE 34 From Symbolism to Operative Diagram: Three Stops Along an Architecture of Mobility Infrastructure Felipe Correa 49 Herzog & de Meuron: 1111 Lincoln Road, Miami, USA Sarah Whiting and Round Table 63 Anthology PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ENDEAVORS 94 Our Secular Communion: In Search of Civic Architecture in the City of Angels Mimi Zeiger 105 Steven Holl: Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USA Kenneth Frampton and Round Table 119 Anthology ENCYCLOPEDIC STORAGE 148 Processing the Library Molly Wright Steenson 157 OMA + Rex: Seattle Public Library, Seattle, USA Sarah Whiting and Round Table 171 Anthology TOOLBOXES 206 The North, the South, and the No-Longer Pedro Ignacio Alonso 217 Smiljan Radić: Mestizo Restaurant, Santiago, Chile Dominique Perrault and Round Table 231 Anthology CULT AND TERRITORY 258 The Church Formerly Known As the Crystal Cathedral Pier Paolo Tamburelli 269 Cristián Undurraga: Retreat Chapel, Auco, Chile Jorge Francisco Liernur and Round Table 283 Anthology
DENSITIES 320 Vertical Density Horacio Torrent 333 Rafael Iglesia: Altamira Tower, Rosario, Argentina Jorge Francisco Liernur and Round Table 347 Anthology ENCOUNTERS 368 The Olympic Connection Luis Castañeda 377 Álvaro Siza: Fundaçao Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil Kenneth Frampton and Round Table 391 Anthology 417 List of Projects MCHAP 432 Biographies 434 Bibliography 436 Picture credits 436 Text credits of the anthologies
THE AMERICAS: A WONDERFUL WORLD Wiel Arets Toward a Hybrid Metropolis When Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in 1875, he was able to do so because the Suez Canal had opened in 1869, meaning that the round trip undertaken in the novel, London to London, initiated comfortable mass-tourism. (One had to see all the images the brochure mentioned.) Up until that moment, traveling was a synonym for expeditions, discovery, adventure, research, applied science, lack of comfort, risk-taking, roughness, and challenges. A corollary of the beginning of a modern, comfortably shrinking world is that it changed the metropolis itself. Alexander von Humboldt, whose magnum opus Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe could be regarded as one of the most important books of the nineteenth century, was a visionary thinker who put the Americas on the map. For him the Earth was a natural unity in which everything was interconnected. During his self-financed expeditions, which carried extreme risks for his own life, he identified ecozones, vegetation, and climate zones, and confirmed that they are surfaces that curve across the globe. In his Naturgemälde der Anden, a cross-section of Chimborazo (which he climbed higher than any man ever had, to a height of 5,917 meters) summed up the microcosm: cohesive nature as a living entity involving the relationship of each part to the whole; unity in infinite variety. Humboldt was fascinated by mining, volcanoes, plants, animals, and indigenous cultures throughout the Americas. He stayed in the Amazonas, learned the native languages in order to study Inca monuments, and conducted research into the climate of Lima. His meeting with Thomas Jefferson in Washington, D.C. was dominated by ideas of freedom of thought and of nature herself as representative of the riches of freedom. At a time of great technological development, when humans felt they no longer had to fear nature, Humboldt wanted to explore its every facet. He sought to nurture life and to learn from it: he was a collector always in motion, and a scientist interested in the free, non-hierarchical exchange of information. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was wide-ranging in his interests and abhorred scientists who specialized in one field. He was incredibly inquisitive, and he spoke and made connections so rapidly that he would give his inter-
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1111 LINCOLN ROAD, BY HERZOG & DE MEURON Sarah Whiting Infrastructure structures the intersection of urbanism and architecture. The physical and digital networks that tie us all together nimbly negotiate the space between the individual and the collective. Ideally, infrastructure makes these transitions so very seamless that we barely even notice it until it’s broken: a power outage; a collapsed bridge; a congested highway. It’s those broken moments that have dominated public attention with ever-greater frequency, however. Infrastructure has lost the promising glow that it emanated at midcentury — the Federal Highway Act of 1956 funded 41,000 miles of interstate roadways with $25 billion. Today, federal spending on infrastructure is at a thirty-year low. Every four years the American Society of Civil Engineers issues a “report card” assessing the country’s infrastructure and the cumulative grade they issued in 2013 was a miserable D+. Thankfully, extra credit can be found in Herzog & de Meuron’s 1111 Lincoln Road parking garage in Miami. While a parking garage may seem utterly insignificant in the light of the cumulative national failures that drove the ASCE’s D+, this relatively small single building has managed to rekindle belief in infrastructure’s potentially catalytic architectural and urban impact. The architectural effect of this garage stems from its almost absurd airiness, which powerfully counters the oppressively low ceiling of typical parking structures. 1111 Lincoln Road’s exaggerated vertical spatiality was the fortuitous result of an imposed requirement to maintain the site’s existing FAR, despite a seemingly incongruous variance that permitted an increase in height. Air became one of this project’s most valuable building components. Design, like air, is another intangible value of 1111 Lincoln Road. The combination of an enterprising developer who believed in the value of design and meticulous architects, whose brutally simple design was finished off with surprisingly delicate detailing, resulted in a parking garage that is quite literally extraordinary. Instead of standardized columns, the structure consists of customized concrete prisms, carefully sculpted to articulate their shape while also underscoring their thinness. Railings are as minimal as possible: thin steel cables
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Photographs of airports included in Rosler, Martha, In the Place of the Public: Observations of a Frequent Flyer, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1999.
MOBILITY
AUTOPIA Reyner Banham 1971 The first time I saw it happen nothing registered in my conscious mind, because it all seemed so natural — as the car in front turned down the off-ramp of the San Diego freeway, the girl beside the driver pulled down the sun-visor and used the mirror on the back of it to tidy her hair. Only when I had seen a couple more incidents of the kind did I catch their import: that coming off the freeway is coming in from outdoors. A domestic or sociable journey in Los Angeles does not end so much at the door of one’s destination as at the off-ramp of the freeway, the mile or two of ground-level streets counts as no more than the front drive of the house. In part, this is a comment on the sheer vastness of the movement pattern of Los Angeles, but more than that it is an acknowledgement that the freeway system in its totality is now a single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life, the fourth ecology of the Angeleno. Though the famous story in Cry California magazine about the family who actually lived in a mobile home on the freeways is now known to be a jesting fabrication, the idea was immediately convincing (several other magazines took it seriously and wanted to reprint it) because there was a great psychological truth spoken in the jest. The freeway is where the Angelenos live a large part of their lives. Such daily sacrifices on the altar of transportation are the common lot of all metropolitan citizens of course. Some, with luck, will spend less time on the average at these devotions, and many will spend them under far more squalid conditions (on the Southern Region of British Railways, or in the New York subway, for instance) but only Los Angeles has made a mystique of such proportions out of its commuting technology that the whole world seems to know about it — tourist postcards from London do not show Piccadilly Circus underground station, but cards from Los Angeles frequently show local equivalents like the “stack” intersection in downtown; Paris is not famous as the home of the Metro in the way Los Angeles is famous as the home of the Freeway (which must be galling for both Detroit and New York which have better claims, historically). There seem to be two major reasons for their dominance in the city image of Los Angeles and both are aspects of their inescapability; firstly, that they are so vast
that you cannot help seeing them, and secondly, that there appears no alternative means of movement and you cannot help using them. There are other and useful streets, and the major boulevards provide an excellent secondary network in many parts of the city, but, psychologically, all are felt to be tributary to the freeways.
Freeway signs.
Furthermore, the actual experience of driving on the freeways prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes. As you acquire the special skills involved, the Los Angeles freeways become a special way of being alive, which can be duplicated, in part, on other systems (England would be a much safer place if those skills could be inculcated on our motorways) but not with this totality and extremity. If motorway driving anywhere calls for a high level of attentiveness, the extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical. That concentration is required beyond doubt, for the freeways can kill — hardly a week passed but I found myself driving slowly under police control past the wreckage of at least one major crash. But on the other hand the freeways are visibly safe — I never saw any of these incidents, or even minor ones, actually happening, even in weeks where I found I had logged a thousand miles of rush-hour driving. So one learns to proceed with a strange and exhilarating mixture of long-range confidence and closerange wariness. And the freeway system can fail; traffic jams can pile up miles long in rush-hours or even on sunny Sunday afternoons, but these jams are rarely stationary for as long as European expectations would suggest. Really serious jams seem to be about as frequent as hold-ups on London suburban railways, and might — if
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NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART, BY STEVEN HOLL Kenneth Frampton This asymmetrical extension of a 1933 Beaux-Arts museum is based on the stratagem of adding a partially sunken gallery sequence that is ingenuously linked back into the classified centerpiece below grade. Wherever it emerges above ground, this 260-meter-long enfilade is clad in a double-layered wall of channel glass which doubles as a continuous clerestory illuminating the exhibits beneath. The fact that this membrane is a source of ambient light irrespective of the time of day accounts for its luminous appearance during the night. This, in the form of five separate monitor lights of varying size and shape, the so called “lenses,” gives the addition a strikingly crystalline character in contrast to the stone-faced opacity of the original building. The largest of these “lenses” is the orthogonal head building which not only houses the main entry at grade, but also various centralized amenities such as the museum shop, the cafeteria, and the library, all which are linked at different levels by a longspan staircase and an adjoining ramp at the first floor which jointly give a dramatically monumental character to the four-story space. The head building flanks a reflecting pool occupying the forecourt of the classical centerpiece. This pool embodies a conceptual artwork by Walter De Maria, entitled One Sun / 34 Moons, where the sun is represented by a gilded rectangle poised just above the surface of the pool and the moons are made up of skylights let into the roof of the two-story garage situated beneath the pool. These lights/moons, which admit natural light during the day and emit artificial light at night, pierce the vaulted concrete roof of the garage and thereby render the volume as an honorific space, appropriate to entering the existing museum at a lower level.
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MCHAP Juror Dominique Perrault at the inaugural MCHAP Exhibition.
MCHAP Jury President Kenneth Frampton views nominated works.
Steven Holl (second from right) with MCHAP Jury at Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.
Steven Holl, Kenneth Frampton, Dominique Perrault.
Chris McVoy at October 2014 MCHAP Symposium.
Karen Christiansen at symposium with IIT Architecture faculty and students.
Wiel Arets and Phyllis Lambert at May 2014 MCHAP Symposium.
Chris McVoy with guests at October 2014 MCHAP Award Dinner.
PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ENDEAVORS
NELSON ATKINS MUSEUM STEVEN HOLL KANSAS CITY, USA Jorge Francisco Liernur: The concept of the Nelson Atkins Museum addresses the fusion between architecture and landscape. The original sketches of the project documented the dualism, such as the stone and the feather, heavy and light, in and out, bounded and unbounded, and perhaps most particularly object and field. Are these dualisms responsible for the quality of the built work? Chris McVoy: Absolutely yes. The driving concepts came from the specifics of making a museum in this specific location while thinking about the development of a new typology of museum. So when Steven Holl and I walked the site during the briefing, we were struck by the sculpture garden. Actually the brief suggested that we make the addition a separate new building, on the north side of the existing one. We sensed immediately that such a solution would have caused a negative tension between the existing building and the new project. We did not follow the brief because we thought that if we instead proposed making a building as a landscape fused with the sculpture garden we would avoid this problematic dialectic between old and new; and we would make a new kind of architecture, complementing the existing building and suggesting new ways of experiencing art. So we decided to go against the brief, while thankfully, all our competitors followed it. Dirk Denison: I would like to ask the client about how they reacted to a very different proposal, concerning site and building, when you were deciding how to adjudicate the competition. In what way did that difference influence the decision-making process? Karen Christiansen: It absolutely influenced it. Steven Holl and Chris McVoy were the last ones to present so we had seen all of the other beautiful buildings, interesting solutions to the problem. But while sitting there I could tell on the faces of the people sitting around watching, that it was “Okay, that really does solve the problem and in a unique way.� That challenged us to think differently and the wonderful outcome is that, before, we
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Cold Storage (2015) is a 26-minute documentary film that limns the secret life of an edifice that is neither a library nor a database, but rather an analog server farm. The structure in question is the Harvard Book Depository (or HD): a climate-controlled memory machine erected in 1986 that serves up both physical packets of information via a pipeline of vans that shuttle back and forth to campus four times a day and digital packets generated by scanners that travel 11 million times faster. Expanded many times over the course of the past three decades, the HD currently consists of three million linear feet of shelving and 127,000 square feet of storage. It houses the ten million books, pamphlets, posters, papers, films, magnetic tapes, photographs, lps, and microforms that form the core of Harvard University’s research and teaching collections but is rarely experienced by the readers and researchers who depend upon its resources. Cold Storage reworks Alain Resnais’s 1956 playful portrait of the National Library of France, All the World’s Memory, in a contemporary key, exposing a world designed for the eyes of laser scanners, inventory tracking systems, and computationally and mechanically aided acts of retrieval, where human agents play mostly subordinate roles. The film begins with a détournement of Resnais’s original script (by Remo Forlani): Because their memory is short-lived, humans accumulate an infinity of memory aids. Confronted with the teeming depositories that result, panic sets in. They fear being trampled by information, submerged beneath heaps of words and data. So, to ensure their freedom, they erect formidable fortresses, faraway stockhouses, libraries that can’t be read except by machine minds. It concludes by taking the viewer on a fantastic journey beyond human memory’s power to endure: Our collective ark, filled with petabyte upon petabyte of memories, sets sail on the sea of time: humankind’s noblest endeavor... oblivion is the destination. Cold Storage is but one component of an experimental web documentary—a so-called database documentary—made up of over 500 carefully architected media objects. It was developed by metaLAB (at) Harvard between 2013 and 2015 as an “animated archive” and extension of the volume The Library Beyond the Book, published in 2014 in the metaLABprojects series by Harvard University Press. The project is documented at http://librarybeyondthebook.org/. Jeffrey Schnapp Credits: director/editor: Cristoforo Magliozzi producer/writer: Jeffrey Schnapp executive producer/co-writer: Matthew Battles
ENCYCLOPEDIC STORAGE
GOOGLE AND THE FUTURE OF BOOKS Robert Darnton 2009 How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be? No one knows, because the settlement is so complex that it is difficult to perceive the legal and economic contours in the new lay of the land. But those of us who are responsible for research libraries have a clear view of a common goal: we want to open up our collections and make them available to readers everywhere. How to get there? The only workable tactic may be vigilance: see as far ahead as you can; and while you keep your eye on the road, remember to look in the rearview mirror. When I look backward, I fix my gaze on the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, its faith in the power of knowledge, and the world of ideas in which it operated — what the enlightened referred to as the Republic of Letters. The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent. Anyone could join it by exercising the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading. Writers formulated ideas, and readers judged them. Thanks to the power of the printed word, the judgments spread in widening circles, and the strongest arguments won. The word also spread by written letters, for the eighteenth century was a great era of epistolary exchange. Read through the correspondence of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson — each filling about fifty volumes — and you can watch the Republic of Letters in operation. All four writers debated all the issues of their day in a steady stream of letters, which crisscrossed Europe and America in a transatlantic information network.
I especially enjoy the exchange of letters between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. They discussed everything, notably the American Constitution, which Madison was helping to write in Philadelphia while Jefferson was representing the new republic in Paris. They often wrote about books, for Jefferson loved to haunt the bookshops in the capital of the Republic of Letters, and he frequently bought books for his friend. The purchases included Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which Jefferson thought that he had got at a bargain price, although he had mistaken a reprint for a first edition. Two future presidents discussing books through the information network of the Enlightenment — it’s a stirring sight. But before this picture of the past fogs over with sentiment, I should add that the Republic of Letters was democratic only in principle. In practice, it was dominated by the wellborn and the rich. Far from being able to live from their pens, most writers had to court patrons, solicit sinecures, lobby for appointments to state-controlled journals, dodge censors, and wangle their way into salons and academies, where reputations were made. While suffering indignities at the hands of their social superiors, they turned on one another. The quarrel between Voltaire and Rousseau illustrates their temper. After reading Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1755, Voltaire wrote to him, “I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race […]. It makes one desire to go down on all fours.” Five years later, Rousseau wrote to Voltaire. “Monsieur, […] I hate you.” The personal conflicts were compounded by social distinctions. Far from functioning like an egalitarian agora, the Republic of Letters suffered from the same disease that ate through all societies in the eighteenth century: privilege. Privileges were not limited to aristocrats. In France, they applied to everything in the world of letters, including printing and the book trade, which were dominated by exclusive guilds, and the books themselves, which could not appear legally without a royal privilege and a censor’s approbation, printed in full in their text. One way to understand this system is to draw on the sociology of knowledge, notably Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of literature as a power field composed of contending positions within the rules of a game that itself is subordinate to the dominating forces of society at large. But one needn’t subscribe to Bourdieu’s school of sociology in order to acknowledge the connections between literature and power. Seen from
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TOOLBOXES
MESTIZO RESTAURANT, BY SMILJAN RADIĆ Dominique Perrault One might wonder if Smiljan Radić assembled the design for his Mestizo Restaurant like the storyboard of a movie — thought out in sequences and moments, carefully mounted in a well-choreographed narrative: exiting the city, descending into the park, entering the restaurant, pausing, and ultimately inviting the visitor to decipher his oeuvre while sipping a pisco sour. And, indeed, like a good movie director he soon elicits the viewer’s astonishment: the enigmatic structure of the building appears to be balanced on a few erratic, vertically placed blocks. At once random and precise, their nature and position make his project seem to pertain, almost inevitably, to the site, as if it had always been there. A “rule” he also followed for the other elements that go to form the building: the beams, the concrete, the wood — each of them is no stranger to a park and together they make the Mestizo Restaurant seem both self-evident and timeless. A quality we find in many Radić projects, not least in the 2014 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, in which the granite rocks stand, literally and metaphorically, as a synonym for his entire work. In his project for Las Américas Park, such rocks are also part of a secondary scenography of structural decisions that — in an earthquake-prone country like Chile — are even more important when it comes to balancing out the whole structure against sudden horizontal loads. The need to anchor the building on the perimeter of the park was used, in the last analysis, as an opportunity to insert the pavilion into the epidermis of the city, at a spot between street and park level. An occasion that Radić fully exploited, proving once again his ability to not only conceive space, but to master and choreograph the narratives it generates.
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DENSITIES
THE SQUATTER SETTLEMENT: AN ARCHITECTURE THAT WORKS John Turner 1968 The squatter barriada-builder who chooses to invest his life’s savings in an environment that he creates, forms himself in the process. The person, as the member of a family and of a local community, finds in the responsibilities and activities of home-building and local improvement the creative dialogue essential for selfdiscovery and growth. The barriada is ground for living that the housing units, marketed or allocated by mass-consumption society, do not provide. The barriada in Lima (like the gecekondu of Istanbul or the villes extra-coutumiers of Kinshasa) is one element of a typical, rapidly growing city in a transitional economy. It is a suburb and, like the suburbs of modern cities, the barriada represents a step up from the inner city — and the vast majority of squatter home-builders are ex-city slum dwellers. Contrary to common belief, the majority of suburban or peri-urban squatter settlements in large cities are not temporary encampments of miserably poor rural migrants unable to find a job and a home in the city proper. The suburban barriada-builder is busy consolidating the improved status and, by doing so, he is further improving it and himself. Typically, he and his very young family have escaped from the depredations of the inner-city slumlord (often a renter of clandestine shacks costing half a minimum wage) thanks to a steadier and better-paid job — enabling the wage-earner to commute, the family to buy their water from lorries until it is laid on and to start building a permanent house. At least one quarter of Lima’s population now live in barriadas and the majority of these 500,000 people are of “consolidating” blue-collar-class families. They are the (very much poorer) Peruvian equivalents of the building society house-buyers of the suburbs of any city of the industrialized world. The cities of the incipiently industrializing or transitional world, such as Lima, respond far more readily to the demands of the poor majority than cities of the industrial or postindustrial world, like Chicago or New York, respond to their poor minorities. Because the poor are the majority in Lima, and because the government controls neither the material nor the human resources necessary for the satisfaction of essential housing needs, the poor must act for themselves — and if the official rules and regula-
tions get in their way these, along with any policemen who may be sent in to enforce them, are generally swept aside. Consequently, the very poor are able to find some corner for their private life, even if it’s only a temporary shack in one of the interstices of the city — on an unguarded lot, in a ravine, or even under a bridge. And the somewhat less poor are able to choose between renting one or two tenement rooms and squatting on the periphery. The urban poor in wealthy and highly institutionalized mass-consumption society do not have these freedoms. At best, like the Algerian and Portuguese immigrants to Paris, they are able to set up very poor bidonvilles on the edge of the city; more commonly, like the ghetto inhabitants of the United States cities, the poor can only rent tenements from slumlords or from public housing authorities. There they must stay until they can make the far higher grade of suburbia in one leap — unless, of course, they are an ethnically discriminated minority, in which case their environment will hold them down forever, or until they burn it down.
Self-construction of a house, La Barriada, Lima, Peru.
The man who would be free must build his own life. The existential value of the barriada is the product of three freedoms: the freedom of community self-selection; the freedom to budget one’s own resources, and the freedom to shape one’s own environment. The freedom of community selfselection Barriada inhabitants, unlike institutionally or corporatively sponsored and controlled project “beneficiaries,” are self-selected. The barriada squatters have a homogeneity of purpose but maintain the heterogeneity of social characteristics vital for cultural stimulation and growth.
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Kazuo Shinohara’s photographs are part of his archives at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Thanks to Professor Taishin Shiozaki for permission and Akiko Miyake (Centre for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu) for digital files. A selection of photographs was published in Shinohara, Kazuo, Street with Human Shadows, Kitakyushu: CCA, 2006.
WINNER MCHAP 2000/2008
WINNER MCHAP 2009/2013
Álvaro Siza Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2008
Herzog & de Meuron 1111 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach (Florida), United States, 2010
FINALISTS
Steven Holl Architects Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (Missouri), United States, 2007
Rafael Iglesia Altamira Tower, Rosario, Argentina, 2001
OMA + REX, Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (Partner) Seattle Public Library, Seattle (Washington), United States, 2004
Smiljan Radić Mestizo Restaurant, Santiago, Chile, 2007
Cristián Undurraga Chapel of Retreat, Auco, Chile, 2009 417
This publication is an initiative of the Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and its affiliated MCHAP Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, to recognize the most distinguished architectural works built on the North and South American continents. The two continents of the Americas bear a history rooted in discovery, invention, and innovation: a culture initially formed by adapting or drawing upon European, African, and Asian influences. The Americas have long ago come of age and this award seeks to build—through a global dissemination of its results—a platform that will engage students, academics, and professionals alike. MCHAP 1, The Americas hopes to inspire practitioners to excellence and nurture an impassioned exchange of ideas. Only in this way can we advance our species and its many cultures; only in this way can we step into an unpredictable future with both confidence and optimism. This award was launched by Wiel Arets, the College of Architecture’s Dean and Rowe Family College of Architecture Dean Endowed Chair, on 13 March 2013 as one of his first initiatives. The inaugural MCHAP jury was chaired by Kenneth Frampton and included Jorge Francisco Liernur, Dominique Perrault, Sarah Whiting, and Wiel Arets. The President and Director of MCHAP would like to thank all those who made this program and publication possible, Illinois Institute of Technology and the College of Architecture, The City of Chicago, and the firms, organizations, and individuals that generously support the initiative, including CCA Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Alphawood Foundation, Kohler and the Mies van der Rohe Society at Illinois Institute of Technology. PUBLISHED BY IITAC Press College of Architecture 3360 South State Street Chicago, IL 60616-3793, USA Phone +1 312 567 3230 www.arch.iit.edu Actar Publishers 355 Lexington Avenue, 8th Floor New York, NY 10017, USA Phone +1 212 966 2207 salesnewyork@actar-d.com eurosales@actar-d.com www.actar.com Guest editor: Fabrizio Gallanti Design: Mainstudio, Edwin van Gelder and Philipp Möckli Translation: Mark Gimson (Spanish and Portuguese/ English), J. Roderick O’Donovan (German/English), except when indicated otherwise Texts supervision: Moisés Puente Proof-reading: Paul Hammond Images supervision: Marta Ariza, Ricardo Devesa Printing: Unicum, Tilburg, The Netherlands ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Wiel Arets, President of MCHAP and Rowe Family College of Architecture Dean Endowed Chair Dirk Denison, Director of MCHAP Daniel O’Connell, Director of Publishing, College of Architecture Lluís Ortega, IITAC Press Editor Vedran Mimica, Director of Research, College of Architecture Sasha Zanko, MCHAP Coordinator © of the edition, IITAC and Actar, 2016 © of the texts, their authors © of the images, their authors All rights reserved Printed in The Netherlands ISBN: 9781945150012 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944675 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA BOARD OF DIRECTORS Frances Bronet, Provost, IIT Alan Cramb, President, IIT
Helyn Goldenberg David Hovey, Founding Principal, Optima Phyllis Lambert, Founding Director, CCA Dirk Lohan, Founder, Lohan Anderson Victor Morgenstern, Trustee, Executive Committee, IIT John W. Rowe, University Regent, IIT INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COUNCIL David Basulto, Founder and Editor in Chief, ArchDaily Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Chair of Art History and Archeology in Columbia University’s School of the Arts and Sciences Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at GSAPP, Columbia University Reed Kroloff, Principal, Jones/Kroloff Jorge Francisco Liernur, Professor at Torcuato Di Tella University, and Researcher of Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technical Investigation Robert McCarter, Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis Dominique Perrault, Founding Principal, Dominique Perrault Architecture Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Sarah Whiting, Dean and William Ward Watkin Professor, Rice School of Architecture Mirko Zardini, Director, CCA CHICAGO COMMITTEE Zurich Esposito, American Institute of Architects, Chicago Chapter Sarah Herda, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Mark Kelly, Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, City of Chicago Lynn Osmond, Chicago Architecture Foundation Zoe Ryan, Department of Architecture and Design, Art Institute of Chicago Pauline Saliga, Society of Architectural Historians Jonathan Solomon, School of The Art Institute of Chicago Edward Uhlir, Millennium Park Foundation Steven F. Weiss, Mies van der Rohe Society Antony Wood, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat IIT FACULTY COMMITTEE Carlos Bedoya Ikeda Thomas Brock Marshall Brown Susan Conger-Austin Keefer Dunn Paul Endres Martin Felsen Frank Flury Ron Henderson Leslie Johnson Sean Keller Robert Krawczyk Eva Kultermann Peter Land Richard E. Nelson Lluís Ortega Paul Pettigrew Mauricio Pezo John Ronan Michelangelo Sabatino Andrew Schachman Agata Mierzwa Siemionow Sofía von Ellrichshausen Antony Wood IIT STUDENT COMMITTEE Saly Alzraikat John Baldwin William Carlson Louise Leite Brianda Mireles Rolando Rodríguez Jorge Serra de Freitas Daniela Sesma Espinoza Jenna Staff Cosette To Alina Tompert
Miami, Herzog & de Meuron Kansas City, Steven Holl Auco, Cristián Undurraga Seattle, OMA + REX Santiago, Smiljan Radić Rosario, Rafael Iglesia Porto Alegre, Álvaro Siza
Guest editor Fabrizio Gallanti Visual essays by Iwan Baan Ramak Fazel Hans Gunther Flieg Edi Hirose Martha Rosler Jeffrey Schnapp Kazuo Shinohara Texts by Pedro Ignacio Alonso Wiel Arets Luis Castañeda Felipe Correa Kenneth Frampton Jorge Francisco Liernur Dominique Perrault Molly Wright Steenson Pier Paolo Tamburelli Horacio Torrent Sarah Whiting Mimi Zeiger