Articles by Andreea Cutieru

With less than half a year to go until the opening, Expo 2020 Dubai released a series of images of the venues hosting the event, which intends to bring together 192 national pavilions, as well as businesses and educational institutions. As the program was delayed for a year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the world expo site is mainly complete, awaiting its opening on October 1st.

The Croatian Pavilion for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale explores how repurposing architectural elements reshapes the individual’s relationship with space and constructs a new place of encounter. Titled Togetherness / Togetherless, the project curated by Idis Turato is a spatial composition of ready-made elements, which are given new meanings and functions, developing a new perspective on architectural space and enabling a temporary community.

UNStudio is part of the consortium that recently won the competition for a new congress and conference centre in the Netherlands, a project intended to further establish the Brainport Eindhoven region as one of Europe’s leading technology hubs. The Elysion Congress Centre expands an exiting, similarly programmed venue, striving for low impact on the surroundings while incorporating numerous sustainable features.

RIBA and Network Rail recently announced the winner of the Re-imagining Railways design competition, which invited architects, engineers and designers to rethink small and medium-sized train stations to improve the travel experience. The winning design, signed by Edinburgh-based architectural practice 7N Architects, features a reinterpreted clock tower serving as a local landmark and a modular station layout that can be adapted to a variety of sites.

For this year’s edition of the Venice Biennale, the Japan Pavilion invites visitors to reflect on the movement of goods fuelling mass consumption and rethink sustainability and reuse in architecture. Titled Co-ownership of Action: Trajectories of Elements, the project curated by Kadowaki Kozo involves dismantling an old wooden Japanese house and transporting it to Venice to be reconstructed in a new configuration with the addition of modern materials. The exhibition exemplifies how old materials could be given an entirely new existence by putting the current movement of goods in the service of reuse rather than consumption.

Philadelphia Museum of Art opened to the public earlier this month after completing an extensive four-year renovation and interior expansion project led by Frank Gehry. The intervention, dubbed the Core Project, focused on renewing the museum’s infrastructure, creating galleries and public spaces while leaving the 1928 exterior untouched. The culmination of two decades of planning and design, the project led by the renowned architect creates a compelling vision for the future of the museum while honouring the landmark building.

The Italian Pavilion for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale explores the capabilities for transformation and adaptation of Italian communities in an attempt to define tangible solutions to current global challenges. Titled “Resilient Communities“, the exhibition curated by Alessandro Melis presents Italian research and innovation across many fields, exploring ideas for improving the conditions of the built environment and addressing climate change, with the hope of defining the building blocks for a sustainable future.

The Hungarian Pavilion at the 17th Venice Biennale explores the often challenging socialist architecture and looks at how this heritage could be reconsidered and given a new future. Titled Othernity – Reconditioning our Modern Heritage, the exhibition curated by Dániel Kovács presents twelve iconic modern buildings of Budapest and the visions of twelve architecture practices from Central and Eastern Europe for their reconditioning. The Hungarian Pavilion’s project looks into how architecture can build on its past to foster resilience, sustainability and strong cultural identities.

In the last decades, architecture has embraced the medium of film to explore new readings of spaces and atmospheres. Crafting a visual narrative of the underlying design concepts while also establishing a connection with the viewer, architecture films use cinematic camera movements and carefully curated sound designs to convey emotion and create a compelling impression of the built object. The article looks into architecture films as a means of capturing the experience of a space, with films by 9sekunden, a team of young designers who combine their passions for film and architecture into an alternative means of exploring architectural atmospheres.

For Design and the City’s sixth episode – a podcast by reSITE on how to make cities more liveable, the team interviewed Christele Harrouk, Archdaily’s Managing Editor and Salim Rouhana, Senior Urban Governance and Resilience Task Team Leader at the World Bank Group. The two Beirut natives talk about the devastating explosion in August last year and share their perspectives on what rebuilding the city could look like.