Japan is still reeling from its greatest national disaster since the bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaski in 1945. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami of 11 March 2011 devastated the northern Tohoku region of Honshu, leaving more than 27,000 people dead and 173,000 homeless. The cost of the damage is estimated at $309bn. The longer-term repercussions will be considerable as the Japanese completely readdress population dispersal and urban design.
Lifestyle
Planet 2012
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Sublime: Tell us a little about your background. Eleanor Fawcett: I trained as an architect. I did my undergraduate degree at Cambridge University, and then got quite interested in everything…
Modern Master
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When the great utilitarian architect Le Corbusier visited Brazil in the 1930s, he was to have a profound effect on Brazilian design. Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer are perhaps the two greatest Brazilian modernist architects most famously responsible for the planning and building of Brasilia in the 1950s. It comes as no surprise, then, that architect Marcio Kogan, one of the leading lights in Brazil today, hails these two along with the likes of Affonso Reidy and Lina Bo Bardi in his pantheon of great national architects.
Home Evolution
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Tom Wolfe, American author and journalist, writing about New York as a city of change in 2001 shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attack, named Michael McDonough as one of only three New York architects doing work worthy of being described as being ‘on the cutting edge’. He was referring to McDonough’s then recently conceived e-House, a high-performance, website-controlled building tucked deep into the Hudson Valley woods in Stone Ridge, New York, which has been in construction since the beginning of the new millennium.
Concrete Forms
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Like all architects who have attained international recognition and status, David Adjaye is rarely in one place very long. We caught the Tanzanian-born 41-year-old just before a talk he gave for the Architecture Foundation at London’s Tate Modern. He was there to present his latest project, a contemporary art museum in Denver.
Waste Not, Want Not
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In slightly broken English, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban charmingly but steadfastly refutes easy throwaway media-friendly notions and labels. ‘What is a green person anyway?’ he asks. ‘Someone with a low carbon footprint,’ I gamely respond. ‘What do you mean,’ he counters. ‘Someone who doesn’t produce much carbon or pollution … It sounds like someone living in a jungle!’ he says gently but completely seriously.
Homes On The Go
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It’s paradoxical, but it seems that the more we have in the First World, and arguably the more blessed we are, the less free many of us feel. Homes and material possessions take on ever greater importance and rather than simply meeting our need for shelter and security, become millstones around our necks. Increasingly disconnected from nature, and one another, we find ourselves dreaming of a simpler existence.
