Product Description

AV Proyectos 99 Foster + Partners

FOSTER + PARTNERS. GMP, CHANGZHOU CULTURE PLAZA · STONE IN DETAIL · RYAN KOOPMANS DESIGN MUSEUM GENT COMPETITION · SOVIET DESIGN 1920-1980

AV Proyectos 99 Foster + Partners

Foster + Partners. Innovation and Sustainability
Founded by Norman Foster in London in 1967, Foster + Partners is today a global studio of sustainable architecture, engineering, urbanism, and industrial design with offices across five continents. From within the practice, structural and environmental engineers, together with other specialist design teams, work alongside architects to develop fully integrated solutions and building strategies that are specifically designed for each project. The following pages include a selection of some of the projects in progress in different countries, and that all have in common the concern for sustainability and the commitment to preserve the natural environment.

Design Museum Gent. International Competition
Housed since 1903 in the Municipal Academy of Ghent, the Design Museum was transferred in 1922 to the Hotel De Coninck, in the touristic heart of the city, and in the 1980s it incorporated the adjacent Huis Leten building to make space for the offices. In 1992 the old rear wing of the hotel was replaced with a new building with exhibition halls; during the whole process the facades onto the courtyard were preserved, with the intention of completing an additional extension in a nearby plot, an initiative that has finally been launched now with the competition to complete the ensemble. The following pages feature the winning proposal and the four shortlisted ones.

Stone in Detail, Seven Examples
Forgotten for years by 20th-century architects, and this despite its being the oldest construction material, stone is now again the choice of many studios for their new projects. Its wide range of colors and textures, its capacity to evoke landscapes, its performance as sustainable material and its at once bold and artisanal character are combined with the use of new technologies and machinery that make it possible to achieve thicknesses, finishes, and forms that were impossible before. The following pages include seven examples of projects that use stone in different ways depending on the scale of the building and its relationship with the context or with the traditions of the place.

gmp en China. Changzhou Culture Plaza
In the Chinese province of Jiangsu, in the east- ern part of the country, Changzhou is a 2,500 year old city with a dense network of rivers that is becoming the new industrial and technological hub in the prosperous Yangtze River delta area. There in Changzhou the Hamburg-based firm Von Gerkan, Marg and Partners Architects (gmp) is completing the construction of a huge cultural complex with an art museum, a library, a hotel, offices, and retail spaces, and that is set to become a new meeting spot for citizens. The project, selected in an international competition held in 2012, comprises six 50-meterhigh pavilions that are combined with one another to create a large public space.

Diseño soviético. Soviet Design, 1920-1980
While the architecture, cinema, or the graphic arts of the Russian avant-gardes have been studied in great detail, other disciplines such as interior design or furniture design are still largely unknown, as is the history of their evolution from the 1930s on. Featuring previously unpublished drawings, many of which were inaccessible until now, the book Soviet Design. From Constructivism to Modernism, 1920-1980 reveals the experimental and innovative character of the projects developed over the course seven decades behind the Iron Curtain, whose design and production principles are rooted in the radical transformation of the arts brought about by the October Revolution.

Ryan Koopmans. Surreal Structures
Fascinated by the surrealist structures of megacities and urban landscapes, as well as by modernity and its environmental and social consequences, photographer Ryan Koopmans, born in 1986 in Amsterdam and raised in Vancouver, studied at the University of British Columbia and later at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His studies in geography, art history, and psychology awakened in him a keen interest in architecture, driving him to look for the points of intersection between the natural and the built. Currently living in Stockholm, Koopmans travels the world illustrating what he calls “the poetry of form in interesting locations.”