Best of the Week

This week, we travel to Valletta, where the controversy generated by Renzo Piano's recent series of interventions prove that nostalgia remains one of the greatest challenges for an architect to overcome. In Japan, Chiaki Arai's new Kadare cultural centre, and the building process behind it, offers an insight into what the architect calls "cultural sustainability." Italian photographer Paola di Pietri portrays Istanbul, discovering a series of satellite cities scattered throughout the palimpsest of the built fabric of spontaneous neighborhoods.

In Venice, an exhibition pays homage to Aldo Rossi, who directed the 3rd Venice Architecture Biennale in 1985. And finally, in the newest installment of the SuperNormal series, Max Gadney reflects on how the increasingly sophisticated visualisation of sports statistics can be extended to other fields, such as building or commerce, and help to improve the general quality of information.

Considering a city's nostalgia
An architecture report from Valletta by Lyanne Mifsud
Independence Day in 1964 brought the first and only Modernist intervention in the capital, a new City-Gate, the only entrance into the city. This marked a new beginning for the country. Don't seek out other Modernist buildings in the city, however, as you will be on a fool's errand. Independence Day also signified the start of a dormant 40 years architecturally. The Maltese Islands house an architectural museum of a style frozen in time built only from local stone, barely piling up to a height of 5 storeys. High buildings clad in glass were never regarded as a possibility; the first building to reach 22 storeys was the Hilton Tower. In 1998. The pre-war vibrance never resumed and the city has devolved into a nostalgic lull that lives on today.
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Chiaki Arai: Kadare Cultural Centre
A news report from Yurihonjo City
According to the architects, "the whole process of Kadare contributes to cultural sustainability." The centre's name, Kadare, was chosen through a public contest, where anyone could send a suggestion. The chosen name combines the region's Akita dialect word "kadare" (meaning "to include in one's group") with the Japanese verb "katari-au" (which means "to talk with someone else, or a group of people.") The project's development was also accompanied by several workshops with locals, some of which were developed specifically with children and students. The spaces were designed based on somaesthetic perception, taking into consideration human scale and the usability of rooms. The way spaces are organised is organic and inconsistent, seeking to emulate the way "mangrove trees grow."
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Istanbul New Stories
A photo-essay from Istanbul by Paola De Pietri
Paola De Pietri narrates the complex events that accompany a month-long exploration of construction sites run by big real estate developers, leading to the discovery of satellite cities scattered throughout the palimpsest of the built fabric of spontaneous neighborhoods. We pass from the historical model to the Gecekondu of illegal buildings temporally layered to redefine a built, fragmented and indefinite horizon. Toki, new public residential neighborhoods that go beyond the ineffective, but balanced, historic residential fabric, are built in the nebulous periphery, allured by the possible construction of a modern image that is the consequence of TV stereotypes — the spectacle society. These places and spaces do not escape privately-induced dynamics; they are gated communities, isolated objects in the urban fabric, made up of buildings and street systems, the result of an entrepreneurial dream of attracting new wealthy residents to a haven of artificial security and inevitable solitude.
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Aldo Rossi's Arches
An architecture report from Venice by Raffaella Poletti
Asserting that architecture was the engine and matter of urban transformation, where the critical dimension sustains the political will to intervene upon the ceaseless construction of the city, Aldo Rossi saw the new edition of the Biennale as an opportunity to overcome the disciplinary impasse that had been consigned to history by Portoghese's Strada Novissima. Hence the decision to not limit the show to only "selected works and exceptional artists" but to hold a competition and exhibition. Open to different contributions from influential architects, university professors and the entire design world, the competition proposed as a subject Venice and its immediate surroundings.
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In-screen sports graphics
A design report from London by Max Gadney
The in-screen graphics are perhaps the most impressive aspect of information design. Here, detail is minimised to show the accuracy of the pitcher in tandem with the sporting action. Data representations are stripped of all elements apart from those being measured — the box and the strikes — and the result is informative and balanced, beautiful in its economy. It seems to draw more from a fighter pilot's head-up display, honed through the intense performance criteria of life-or-death scenarios, than from the overblown 3D displays often seen on sports networks. Perhaps George Orwell's statement that "serious sport is war minus the shooting" was unwittingly a design-driver.
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