Editors: Ana Tostões, Zara Ferreira
Keywords: Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Reuse, Renovation, Restoration.
The Modern Movement has demonstrated its long term legitimacy, as a concept endowed with an extraordinary and lasting longevity. Either way, it becomes increasingly important to acknowledge and value this heritage, in order to enable a skilled, informed and enlightened intervention. Such matters as materials and technology reuse, spatial and functional transformations as well as updating legislation, are part of the contemporary agenda. Knowing that many modern architects sought new heights of functionality and changeability, the challenge for today is how to deal with the heritage in relation to its continuously changing context, physical, economic and functional, as well as socio-cultural, political and scientific. I consider that the reuse project is starting to “make history” and I share the idea that heritage transforms itself with us. Therefore, modern architecture can be a resource that asks for our attention in terms of quality, economy and sustainability.
Published:
2015-03-01
Editorial
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The Modern Movement has demonstrated its long term legitimacy, as a concept endowed with an extraordinary and lasting longevity. Either way, it becomes increasingly important to acknowledge and value this heritage, in order to enable a skilled, informed and enlightened intervention. Such matters as materials and technology reuse, spatial and functional transformations as well as updating legislation, are part of the contemporary agenda. Knowing that many modern architects sought new heights of functionality and changeability, the challenge for today is how to deal with the heritage in...
Lectures
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The following article is an edited version of the keynote presented at the 13th International docomomo Conference that took place in Seoul, Korea, on September 2014. The paper discusses how “Western” architecture was first introduced to Korean soil: a French Catholic missionary-architect built the Seoul Cathedral at the end of the 19th century. American and Canadian architects built educational buildings for the Protestant missionary-founded colleges in Korea. Japanese civil servant architects built some public buildings during the colonial rule. The work of two prominent Korean...
Essays
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In the period I was teaching at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, from 1984–1998, I often had the privilege to welcome our first year students entering the faculty of architecture. After I had paid my compliments to the students for having chosen a fascinating study and future profession I told them that for environmental and climate reasons, it would be best not to build at all any longer. And since this was unrealistic, the next best thing was that we should learn how to renew the world with things that exist already. Laughter was always their response. Didn’t...
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The following article is an edited version of the keynote presented at the 13th International docomomo Conference that took place in Seoul, Korea, on September 2014. The economic miracle, increasing transparency and growing emancipation are some of the striking advantages of modernity. However these meet their opposites in severe conflicts at both global and regional scales. Where the oppressive new meets the vulnerable old the damage is at its heaviest and often non-reversible. The history of modernity in the Western world, from the European Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the...
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Hizuchi Elementary School is an example of timber modern architecture completed between 1956 and 1958. It was recognized as one of the twenty representative modern buildings in Japan by docomomo in 1999, and from 2006 to 2009 it was meticulously restored. The consortium members for its conservation and renovation were awarded the Annual Award of the Architectural Institute of Japan and World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize in 2012. This paper outlines the project of the Hizuchi Elementary School and the architect Matsumura Masatsune who designed it.
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Luis Barragán (1902–1988) produced few works in his prime, among which, other than his own house, in the Jardines de Pedregal only the Casa Prieto López (1950) has been preserved intact. It was successfully restored when Cesar Cervantes purchased it in early 2014 and hired architects Jorge Covarrubias and Benjamín González Henze. After extensive research, the architects, respecting the context and simplicity of design, eliminated additions and carefully conserved architectural details and furnishings; the color of the walls was restored based on stratigraphic findings that revealed...
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This essay synthesizes a serious concern related to built ecclisiastical heritage in Quebec. Most of all, it intends to present the recent conversion of the church of Sainte-Germaine-Cousin in Montreal, built between 1960 and 1962 by architect Gérard Notebaert into a community center related to social housing and child care. Today, after a decade and as the project is nearly complete, it recounts a modern heritage tale that led to an exceptional outcome from social and cultural perspectives and, of course, from an architectural angle. On a larger scale, this project responded sensitively...
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This is a progress report on the plan to conserve and repair the Musashi-Ranzan Country Club clubhouse designed by architect Taro Amano. It is a valuable example of the conservation and repair of private company-owned modern reinforced concrete architecture without the use of subsidies. Project planning commenced in 2009, and minor construction has been carried out each year, with the third installment of work carried out in 2014. For carrying out the construction, the design content and course of construction are based on the results of an analysis and survey of the original building....
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When it comes to ensuring the authenticity of an architectural conservation project, is an architect’s interpretation of the original sufficient in itself? Or should the architect’s largely intuitive understanding of a site be complemented by the knowledge of the architectural historian? The adaptive reuse of the Île des Soeurs service station, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1967 and renovated by architect Éric Gauthier in 2011, raises such questions. The unique value of this small facility is recognized by its designation as a historic monument. Today, it is a multigenerational...
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The International House of Japan (I-House) in Tokyo is a non-governmental organization that has promoted rich international intellectual exchanges. Designed by three young, up-and-coming architects Kunio Maekawa, Junzo Sakakura, and Junzo Yoshimura, the building of I-House in an exquisite modern Japanese style was built in 1955, but due to financial difficulties, the building was threatened with demolition. The Architectural Institute of Japan scrambled to assemble a special panel to present a conservation plan in 2004. Ultimately, the Board of Trustees decided to follow the panel’s...
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Recent interventions in modern oeuvres of high cultural significance have set new challenges, opening discussion on the various positions associated with their preservation and sustainability. In particular, the relationship between newly conceived architecture and modern heritage, for which the analysis of the design in the original building, the ideas promoted in terms of its significance and the results obtained in material terms, become the key features in each case. The experience of the United Nations ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) building in...
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The Kagawa Prefectural Government Office East Building, designed by Kenzo Tange, was completed in 1958, and in addition to acting as an important disaster prevention base facility, it possesses a cultural value through its many spaces open to the public and its expression of traditional Japanese architectural ideas in concrete. It is part of the current government offices, and while the concrete itself is expected to be viable for over 50 years, it will require substantial improvements in order to meet the most recent earthquake resistance standards. As such, Kagawa Prefecture, through...
Documentation Issues
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This article proposes analyzing the Cap Ducal restaurant, a work by architect Roberto Dávila Carson in 1936, as an emblematic construction in Chile’s favorite summer resort city, Viña del Mar. The proposal is to place the relevance and value of this pioneer work of modernity in a wide context of promotion, in which it represents the changes in social and cultural practices related to the resort. From the realm of architecture where, this work establishes the beginning of a new formal language, as well as a part of the new urban configuration of the city as one of the then new tourist...
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This article examines recent and current controversy over the Civic Administration Building (1954- 1966) in Auckland, New Zealand. Unoccupied since the end of 2014, the building’s future is uncertain. Its heritage value is widely recognized by heritage professionals and commentators. Yet Auckland Council, the building’s owner and former occupier, does not recognize its significance and has not scheduled it as a heritage building on its district plan. To the contrary, it has floated the possibility of demolishing it. This article considers the building’s history, significance and possible...
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The purpose of this paper is to report on the characteristics of modern architecture in Setif, a town in eastern Algeria, created from scratch during the French occupation. It will be of a particular interest to unveil a part of the puzzle that represents the “backdrop” of modern architecture, in this city. The present paper tries to contain and recognize the different forms of expression of this architecture, through a historical perspective, punctuated by major events in order to shed light on the characteristics of modern architecture in Setif (1930-1962) and by which they were...
News
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Spanish colonial architecture in Africa constitutes an expanding field of research. With a variety of cultural activities devoted to disseminating its knowledge to the general public in the last few years, those taking place in former Spanish colonies remain scarce. Among the initiatives to reverse this situation, was the oðcial opening, on Friday, December #th #à%, of the exhibition Tetouan Modern Challenge 1912–2012. Alfonso de Sierra Ochoa and the Housing Question, in Larache (Morocco).
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SAAL (Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local), Local Ambulatory Support Service, was a program for the construction of houses in poor neighborhoods. It followed the revolu- tionary process which, in 1974, brought to an end half a century of dictatorship in Portugal. Although properly contextualized in a very specific historical process, nowadays it is still a tool to think, to question and to debate the issues and challenges of housing as well as its ineludible proximity to architecture.
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!e study of architecture, and particularly of the great legacy of modern architecture, has substantially been achieved from its irrefutable documentary sources: the pho- tographs. Since the advent of photography in the mid-19th Century we are witnessing a blissful basis for its pairing with architecture. Once buildings were depicted, they could start to be studied, classified and dated. Later on, the revolutionary character that brought the modernists to the fore found in photography the opportune instrument to undertake its propaganda in mass media that valued these architectural...
