On exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Now through March 23, 2003
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Focusing on international building projects of extraordinary design caliber that integrate architecture, landscape, and infrastructure to fully engage today's waterfront, Van Alen Institute's Architecture + Water exhibition drew together five examples from around the world. These projects are Yokohama International Port Terminal, Japan, by Foreign Office Architects; Blur Building, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, by Diller + Scofidio; Quattro Villa, Ypenburg, The Hague, The Netherlands, by MVRDV; Lake Whitney Water Treatment Plant, Hamden, Connecticut, USA, by Steven Holl Architects and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., and Blackfriars Station, London, England, by Alsop Architects. Models, drawings, and additional media demonstrited the projects in depth and powerfully conveed how designers can respond to the new programs and new expectations of 21st century waterfront cities.

Curated by Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis.

Exhibit ran at the Van Alen Institute, from March 28th to October 26th 2001.

Yokohama Port Terminal
Yokohama, Japan
Foreign Office Architects

Foreign Office Architect's winning entry in the celebrated 1995 Yokohama competition marked a new direction for architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture. Today they are translating their spectacular idea into a built structure, scheduled for completion in 2002. The project is a complex network of interconnecting surfaces, forming a continuous structure that connects the boarding level with the entrance to the city and the terminal below. The Yokohama project represents a radical rethinking of architectural conventions, replacing the typical linear structure of piers created by orthogonal geometries with a fluid and multi-directional space intended to read as an extension of the city. FOA based their design on a circulation diagram of interlocking loops that would be made of folded steel - resistant to earthquake stresses and evocative of the ship building industry.

Co-curator Paul Lewis explains why they chose the project for inclusion in the exhibition. “This building-as-pier reinvents the logic of the ferry terminal program through wave-based geometry. Through a series of horizontal and vertical slippages, the linear logic of the pier gives way to a complex topological geometry, which allows for the linking of public and private functions, interior and exterior spaces, and land and ship zones. The system of folding surfaces, composed of steel plated trusses that recall maritime construction, produces a heterogeneity of programmatic and spatial associations through a continuous, yet differentiated, ground.”

Foreign Office Architects is a pioneering architectural practice founded in London in 1992. It has since expanded to include an office in Japan. The principal partners are Farshid Moussavi, a graduate with a Masters in Architecture from Harvard University and Alejandro Zaera Polo, who also graduated from Harvard. Both formerly worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam and are Unit Masters at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. They have also been visiting critics at Princeton and Columbia Universities. Current projects include a publishing headquarters in Paju City, Korea, and a Park and Open air Auditorium in Barcelona, Spain. Completed projects include New Belgo restaurant and Bermondsey Antiques Market, in London. This year they were among the short-listed winners for the competition to design Porto Antico, Genova, Italy and in 2000 they were principals of a finalist team in the competition to design Downsview Park in Toronto, exhibited at Van Alen Institute in December 2000.

Quattro Villa
Voorlopig, Ontwerp, The Netherlands
MVRDV

MVRDV has long been committed to researching and developing ways to create "three-dimensional city planning" or high rise urban landscapes, where nature is stacked on multi-level pavilions. The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and it is steadily growing
concerned about its urban landscape. MVRDV's Quattro Villa in Voorlopig, Ontwerp is a reaction to the process of returning vast stretches of “reclaimed” dry land - “polders” - to marshland. Co-curator Paul Lewis desribes the Quattro Villa. “Located on a reclaimed polder, MVRDV ingeniously lifts four apartments on two elevator stilts above a watery landscape. This allows for cars, boats, and pedestrians to co-mingle at the water level, unobstructed by the waterfront architecture. Combining the modernist desire for suspension with the vernacular logic of pole dwellings, the building produces an extraordinary platform for domestic life at the waterfront.”

MVRDV was set up in Rotterdam in 1991 by Winy Maas and Jacob van Rijs, who had previously worked for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and Nathalie de Vries. This acclaimed architectural practice has completed numerous projects including the Netherlands Pavilion for EXPO 2000, a 125-foot high structure of stacked landscape demonstrating how you can build ecologically on an area of small land mass. Other projects include the headquarters building for the avant-garde radio, television and film production company VPRO outside of Hilversum, northeast of Rotterdam, built in 1997, and the Wozoco apartment complex for the elderly in west Amsterdam (Westelijke Tuinsteden), built in 1994. In 1998 they published FARMAX: An Excursion in Density (010 Publishers).

Lake Whitney Water Treatment Plant
Hamden, Connecticut, USA
Steven Holl Architects and Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates

The project for the Lake Whitney Water Treatment Plant includes a new water treatment facility built on the historic site of the old New Haven Treatment Plant and a new waterworks park which sits over and around the stainless steel tank of the water treatment facility. As Paul Lewis explains, the curators chose the project because, “it redefines a water treatment plant through an engagement with landscape and architectural design. Public infrastructure becomes public park, with a series of gardens (designed in collaboration with Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates) corresponding to the various stages of water filtration. Below this occupiable ground, the building intertwines a public tour route with the stages of water processing.”

Steven Holl Architects was established in 1976. Since then it has won numerous awards and completed many prestigious projects. Steven Holl graduated from the University of Washington. In 1970 he studied architecture in Rome and in 1976 he worked on post-graduate studies at the Architectural Association in London. In 1989 the Museum of Modern Art presented Holl's work in a special two-man show, purchasing several drawings for their permanent collection. Recently Holl received a National A.I.A. Award for Design Excellence for the Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle, Washington. Other major projects include, the Bellevue Art Museum near Seattle, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and a retail and housing development in Chiba, Japan.

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. was founded in 1982 and has since directed the design and construction of more than 300 landscapes worldwide. They include the expansion of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and a l988-92 project for the Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board. Van Valkenburgh is a Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1994 he published Design With The Land: Landscape Architecture of Michael Van Valkenburgh (Princeton Architectural Press).

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BLUR
Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland
Diller + Scofidio

The Blur Building is an ambitious project for the Swiss EXPO 2002. Under construction, it involves an exhibition center, theaters, and restaurants which are integrated into a surrealist landscape on 32 acres of lakefront property. The main attraction, Blur, is a media building that hovers over the lake shrouded in “mist.” “The Blur Building makes the various forms of water (mist, dew, fog, drinking water) the substance of its architecture. A tensegrity frame [a spatial network of discontinuous compression struts and continuous tension rods] covered with a uniform grid of high-pressure nozzles is used to generate an envelope of fog, exploiting the atmospheric effects of water to camouflage its presence. As an inhabitable cloud, the physical and optical sense of water vapor is the content of this exhibition pavilion. The lake water becomes the building, water soluble architecture,” explains co-curator Paul Lewis.

Diller + Scofidio is an award winning interdisciplinary studio combining art, architecture and the performing arts. Elizabeth Diller is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Princeton University and Ricardo Scofidio is professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union. As well as winning a MacArthur Fellowship Award in1999, they were also awarded a major 1999 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Blackfriars Station
London, England
Alsop Architects

The Thameslink 2000 project aims to provide greatly enhanced and badly needed mainline rail links across London from north to south. Thameslink 2000 will provide 24 trains every hour in each direction, over a route extending from Norfolk to Sussex, requiring a major investment in new tunnels, bridges, signaling and stations. As co-curator Paul Lewis explains the dynamic and innovative design for the new Blackfriars Station, whose main architectural feature is a roof made from a structure of glazed canopies, is a critical aspect of that plan. “As an essential part of London’s Thames waterfront re-development, the platforms on Blackfriars Station are located not at the end of the bridge but on the very bridge itself. Lodged directly in the middle of the Thames, this project uses the bridge equally as destination, terminus, and a means of access. One arrives in town, thus, in the middle of the river.”

Alsop Architects is an award-winning architectural and planning practice with offices in London, Moscow and Hamburg. Will Alsop established the practice in London in 1979. The firm has a significant and diverse portfolio of clients. Most celebrated projects include the Regional Government Headquarters Building in Marseilles, France; the Hamburg Ferry terminal; the Cardiff Bay Visitor's Centre and a new Library and Media Centre in Peckham, London, for which they won the prestigious Stirling Award for Building of the Year awarded given by The Royal Institute of British Architects.

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