Month: December 2021

Benthem Crouwel Architects reveals competition-winning design for the Valley, a new mixed-use development comprising housing, workspaces and retail in Prague. Featuring a rooftop landscape designed by Felixx landscape architects and a network of diverse public spaces, the project introduces high density and varied programming while establishing a strong connection with the surrounding neighbourhood.

As far as history goes back, art and architecture have always been interrelated disciplines. From the elaboration of the Baroque movement, to the geometric framework of modernism, architects found inspiration from stylistic approaches, techniques, and concepts of historic art movements, and translated them into large-scale habitable structures. In this article, we explore how 5 art movements paved the way for modern day architecture, looking into how architects borrowed from their characteristics and approaches to design to create their very own architectural compositions.

From the T house of Cazú Zegers, designed in 2009 and built in 2011 on the shore of Laguna de Aculeo in Chile, a way of naming the projects arises, which comes from the alphabet, it is the alphabet of the poetic word and with this a series of houses that are the abstract synthesis of a letter that becomes a work of architecture. It has to do with the creation of reality through language. Each “letter house” has a unique dialogue with the landscape, a territorial dialogue where the work is a unity between landscape and architecture. The Ye house is a pavilion suspended over a landscape of myrtles with a privileged view of the Cayumapu River and its wetlands, created after the earthquake of May 29, 1960, in Valdivia. These wetlands have a rich fauna of birds such as the endemic black-necked swan and a dense vegetation layer composed of reeds and lotus flowers, among other species that are very characteristic of these territories.

From the city to the countryside – Even before the worldwide pandemic caused by the COVID-19, people were already leaving urban life behind and living in rural areas, and with the rise of social networking services and other media, it was not uncommon for people to set up stores in rural areas, this was possible since they have experience on attracting customers by making use of their unique shops. Nowadays due to COVID-19 this trend of returning to rural areas is accelerating.