Architectures

At the top of a sloping garden is a mysterious white dome and an undulating glass façade: the headquarters of the French Communist Party built between 1965 and 1980 by Oscar Niemeyer. A fine example of the curtain wall designed by Jean Prouve, an extraordinary Central Committee room under the dome, some of the finest Parisian architecture of the period.

The Unal House is located in the heart of a forest. It is made up of several interlocking, spherical forms, almost like boules. Its designer, builder and inhabitant Joël Unal chose to reproduce organic forms, resembling mushrooms. The building method he used – a shotcrete layer - is rather particular to him.

Designed by the architects Jan Brickman and Leendert Van der Vlugt, supervised by Kees Van der Leuw, the boss of Van Nelle, the factory is the most important and the most accomplished example of industrial architecture in the modern movement. The result of a cross between Taylorism and Bauhaus, the Van Nelle factory at Rotterdam, built between 1926 and 1931, is a gigantic factory in which, up to the 80s, they processed tobacco, coffee and tea. Rather than a simple building, picture a great machine, a huge liner clad in glass and metal. The completely glazed facades expose the internal structure of the buildings and allowed the employees to work by daylight. Every step through lift wells, staircases and bridges was visible thanks to their glass walls – transparency was both a touch of style and a means of surveillance.

On the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, a huge vessel emerges from the treetops, its twelve glass sails billowing in an imaginary wind. The new museum of contemporary art is also an architectural promenade.

Finished in 1627, the mausoleum of Itimad-Ud-Daula is considered to be the precursor of the Taj Mahal - on which construction started just a few years later, in 1631. This remarkable monument reigns over the city of Agra, in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh.

After the tsunami in Japan in March 2011, an architects’ collective led by Tokyo Ito launched the project “Homes for All”, communal buildings for the inhabitants of the devastated towns. Along with Toyo Ito, 3 young architects, Su Fujimoto, Kumiko Inui and Akihisa Hirata, build one of these homes in Rikuzentakata. Using trees from the destroyed forest, they create the image of a house with a pointed roof, pierced by 19 tree trunks. Running around the inner space is a promenade deck alternating stairs and terraces, facing the countryside: the rectangular street grid is the only trace left of the vanished town. Designed in 6 months, built in 5 months, the “Home” was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Biennale. The title is a reference to the phenomenon of mutual assistance and solidarity that emerges following a catastrophe. The”Home for All” project seeks to further such utopias.

The China Academy of Art allowed architect Wang Shu (Pritzker Prize, 2012) to work in total freedom. Made up of many elements, the Guest House is much more than just another gesture of today’s “star architecture”. Built upon the ruins of tradition, it bears the values that anchor it in the future.

Built at the dawn of the 20th century, the Glasgow School of Art is the masterpiece of the only British artist considered as a precursor of modernity, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The most eminent practitioner of the "Glasgow Style", the equivalent of French Art Nouveau, Mackintosh devoted more than 10 years to fulfilling what is without doubt his most innovative architectural project, a masterwork that combines constructive rationality, Art nouveau subjectivism, obsessibe attention to detail and decorative fantasy. 10 years of work during which the architect never once set foot on the building site. After many years in purgatory, the school has become a place of pilgrimage for generations of architects. Its influence is without parallel in early 20th century architecture.