Happy Birthday Everyone!

Peter Zumthor turns 71 years old today. Happy Birthday!

I totally dig this man buildings because he is obsessed with making a sensory overload in a building. He was the first architect I knew of that really built a build in it's entirety though his attention to the presence of a building, both inside and out, before I even knew what that was a thing.

His concern is with context, experience and materiality, not so much with the purely aesthetic. He aspires to a truly meaningful architecture of place and experience, which interests me greatly. To get to know more about this idea, can watch his lecture series in Tel Aviv last year on the “Seven Personal Observations on Presence In Architecture” It's pretty rad.

This buildings include the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, The Saint Benedict Chapel in Sumvitg, and the 2011 Serpentine, you know, the big black one.

Now, If you think that's good going, it is also I M Pei's 97th birthday! Phew.

Ieoh Ming Pei , is one of the last living modernist architect. When given the Pritzker Prizein 1983, the jury citation stated that he “has given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms.” Pretty tidy. You know his stuff including the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, the JFK Presidential Library in Boston and the now iconic crystalline extension to the Louvre in Paris.

Pei has rejected the implications of globalism inherent in the “International Modernist Style" instead advocating contextual development and variation in style. Which, in short, meant his buildings actually where related to, used, loved and have longevity, unlike some other now obsolete modernist buildings.

Commenting that “the important distinction is between a stylistic approach to the design; and an analytical approach giving the process of due consideration to time, place, and purpose.” He constantly urged architects to look more to their architectural tradition, rather than designing in a Western style, particularly in rapidly expanding Asia.

Pretty good day for architecture brains I'd say...