Modern Public Architecture: Cultural Center & Library in Pompano Beach, Florida

What is it:
  New two-story, 46,000 sf library, cultural center building and civic campus adjacent to City Hall, replacing the old library on E. Atlantic Boulevard open from from 1952 until November 2017.
  The new facility features a standard library, media labs, 5,000sf of theater/flex event space and an exhibition gallery of 750sf. Construction included also a multipurpose room, three tutoring rooms, a group study room, conference room, storytelling/program room, computer lab and the Teen Tech Studio, which is designed to encourage young adults to creatively explore digital media.
  The new library houses a collection of approximately 50,000 items including books, DVDs, CDs, publications and reference materials.
  Site improvements included a new civic plaza featuring raised planter areas, street furniture, a lightning bolt plaza and a new paved breezeway connecting the parking areas to the civic plaza.

Read on about more building and construction details and see all the photos on https://www.modernsouthflorida.com/modernist-angle-blog/modern-architecture-in-public-cultural-center-library-in-pompano-beach-florida

Pritzker-price winner and Architect Zaha Hadid dies suddenly at age 65

Sadly, today masterful architect Dame Zaha Hadid died suddenly from a heart attack, after being hospitalised with bronchitis in Miami where she was working on a new condominium project.

The British architect, born in Iraq in 1950, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth (thus "Dame", the female equivalent to "Sir") and also won a Pritzker price, architectur's equivalent to the Nobel price.

Three good pieces on Hadid you will find at the NYTimes, ArchDaily and Curbed.

To the many photos of her outstanding work if I find them(!) I may add a few of my own from her incredible Bergisel ski-jump in Innsbruck, Austria, as well as from her Nordpark railway stations in Innsbruck as well.

Frei Otto, master of tent-like architecture, wins Pritzker Price one day before dying

Frei Otto, the architect behind some of the most important structures and engineering ideas of the last century, has died just two weeks before he was to receive the Pritzker Prize—the award that people often describe as the Nobel Prize for architecture.

Roof for Olympic park, Munich/Germany 1972

Football arena at Olympic park, Munich/Germany 1972

(Thankfully Otto, born 1925, who died Monday at the age of 89 years, had already learned of the news, which he greeted with characteristic modesty: “I have never done anything to gain this prize” he said.)

Otto kept himself outside the fray of crazy-famous architects that defines the 1990s and 2000s. But without him, many of the structures and buildings of the past 50 years wouldn't exist. Because Otto wasn't just an architect—he was also a brilliant inventor and engineer who pioneered some of the most far-fetched feats of structural engineering ever completed.

Otto was obsessed with tensile structures—think the roof of a tent, where a piece of fabric hangs between two points in tension, versus a cabin, where the beams are in compression instead. And his obsession came from a very literal experience with tent-like shelters: As a soldier during the second World War, he spent two years as a prisoner of war in France where he built all manner of structures with anything he could find laying around, as The New York Times recounts today. Though he had been apprenticed as a stone mason before the war, he came out of the experience possessed by the idea of building with less.

Entrance Arch at the Federal Garden Show, Cologne/Germany 1957

You could trace his whole career back to those two years spend in captivity—the next five decades were spent trying to build the best spaces with as little as possible, as the Pritzker jury described today. That often meant using lightweight, inexpensive plastics or plexiglass strung between complex hardware frameworks to create huge, light-filled volumes that could be easily assembled and disassembled.

Bubbles. The wings of insects, bats, and birds. Spider webs. Trees. Otto's research into experimental structural engineering—often based on nature—was just as important as his buildings, especially since many of his buildings were temporary.

MIT published two volumes of it in the 1960s, packed with ideas about how tensile strength could be utilized in architecture, from membranes to pneumatics, each of which are now classics. His ideas about inexpensive, light-footprint buildings made him a hero to the progressive designers and inventors of the 1960s and 70s; the Whole Earth Catalog even published examples of his work.

The most famous example of this—the one you'll see a lot today—is his roof for the Munich Olympic Park for the Summer Olympics in 1972.

Detail, roof for Olympic park, Munich/Germany 1972

But the ghosts of the Third Reich influenced his work in other ways, too. As the Pritzker Jury alludes to:

    His architecture would always be a reaction to the heavy, columned buildings constructed for a supposed eternity under the Third Reich in Germany. Otto's work, in contrast, was lightweight, open to nature, democratic, low-cost, and sometimes even temporary.

It's a thread you can find running through all of his work—a direct reaction to the presumptuous idea that any building is forever, or that architecture is a tool for doing harm.

Aviary in the Munich Zoo at Hellabrunn, Munich/Germany 1980

Impermanence has definitely been the case with Otto's work. In some cases, photos are all that remain. But you can find his influence everywhere: From the NFL stadiums to Google, whose newly-announced complex is webbed with tensile netting that's directly inspired by Otto's work.

But in a 2005 interview with Icon Eye, he left young architects with a little advice about the difference between what you can build and what you should build:

"Maybe you know that I was a close friend of Bucky Fuller, and we debated the idea of large domes. But why should we build very large spaces when they are not necessary? We can build houses which are two or three kilometres high and we can design halls spanning several kilometres and covering a whole city but we have to ask what does it really make? What does society really need?"

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Original article by gizmodo.com. Photos by Atelier Frei Otto, roof detail by Nils Gores

Günter Behnisch, German modernist architect, 1922–2010

The architect who gave post-War Germany a new face, Günther Behnisch, passed away in July at the age of 88. 

His radical modern designs, including the Munich Olympic Stadium, marked a departure from the bombastic architecture of the Nazi era and shaped the face of the new German democracy.

The world gazed at Behnisch's work on August 26, 1972 with the opening of the Munich Olympic Games. The stadium he designed at the age of 50 was an icon – a perfect symbol for the new, democratic Germany (He designed the Olympic park together with the architect Frei Otto and the landscape planner Günther Grzimek).

Olympic Park and Stadium, Munich

The open, undulating tent roof that seems so light, so weightless, reaches well beyond the actual stadium. The magically woven, transparent carpet, 75,000 square metres in size, rests gently on the Olympic Park and sent a powerful message: A democratic, open country is welcoming the nations of the world. It was an attempt to distinguish West Germany from the bombastic architecture of the Nazi era when Berlin had hosted the 1936 Olympics.

Behnisch, who was born in 1922 and who became a submarine commander in WWII, took an interest in architecture when he picked up a book on the subject in a hotel in the Italian port of La Spezia. "It was about how you construct buildings. The war was over and I had to do something for a living," he recalled. He became a prisoner of war; the British released him in 1947. After that he studied architecture in Stuttgart. He opened an office in 1952 and quickly gained kudos for designing school buildings and sports halls.

In 1973, Behnisch was awarded the coveted task of designing the new parliament in the then-West German capital, Bonn, but the project dragged on for an eternity. He only got the green light in 1987 for a modified version, and in 1992, his parliament building was finally opened. But Germany was reunited by then, and the Parliament moved to Berlin at the end of the 1990s.

 

Plenary Hall, Bonn (1991 - 1992)

Focusing more on public buildings than residences – his website lists only nine residential projects – many other of his designs were highly regarded, but much less in the limelight than the Olympic Stadium or the Plenary Hall:

Tower of the Nürnberg Airport (1997-1999)

NordLB bank in Hannover (1999-2002)

Therme Bad Aibling (hot mineral springs), in Bad Aibling outside of Munich (which my wife and I visited in winter 2008, swimming from the inside to the outside on a crisp and clear winter night – incredible!)

Buchheim-Museum, Bernied (1997 - 2001) located on Starnberg Lake outside of Munich, dedicated to the Buchheim art (as well as knick-knack) collection. The structure, just down the road from my wife’s and my Bavarian base camp, resembles a ship, jutting at a 90° angle towards and over the lake.

The Berlin Academy of the Arts was his last spectacular project, but also rightly criticized for design faults such as excessive noise and not enough space.

Berlin planning department officials had been horrified by his plan for a high-tech glass façade. "Why not?" said Behnisch the modernist. "I never even thought of putting a stone façade there. We didn't want to awaken any associations with the pretentiousness of the Hitler and Wilhelminian architecture." 

He deeply disliked the new style of the Berlin republic and of its architecture. He regarded historical copies as the architecture of security that served a petit-bourgeois yearning for comfort at a time when bold new visions were needed. "If someone needs comfort, they should get a cat," he once said laconically.

Günter Behnisch died on 12 July 2010 in his home in Stuttgart, Germany.

Excerpted from and based on an article in the Der Spiegel, published 7/13/2010 

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