At the end of the Second World War when the Potsdam Conference (1945) pushed back the German border, part of the region of Western Pomerania remained in Polish territory. The German inhabitants were deported and quickly replaced by new Polish settlers. For decades, Szczecin, the capital of the region, suffered from this uprooting and the ripping apart of its social fabric, a situation aggravated by the fact that, thanks to Soviet censorship, the people were denied a rigorous history of what had actually happened. This memory hole was accompanied by the testimony of numerous physical holes left in the city centre by allied aerial bombing attacks. What had once been a densely-populated, vibrant urban zone was turned into a pockmarked territory which Soviet architecture continued to ill-treat by opening up new motorways, putting up crude constructions of hefty concrete blocks and neglecting the city’s many desolate, empty lots.
Photography: Juliusz Sokołowski, Jakub Certowicz, Aneta Popławska-Suś, Magdalena Kotelon
Developer: Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie
Collaborators: authors: Robert Konieczny, Katarzyna Furgalinska, Dorota Zurek coauthor: Michal Lisinski collaboration: Aleksandra Stolecka, Piotr Tokarski, Adam Radzimski, Joanna Biedna, Magdalena Adamczak
Conceived as a living, kinetic sculpture nested within the courtyard of the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis, Green Air proposes an immersive space, a hanging garden that floats above a tapestry of ever changing shadows.
The Biodome, originally built as a velodrome for the 1976 Olympic Games, and converted into a natural science museum in 1992, launched an international competition in 2014 to revitalize its visitors’ experiences as part of a city-wide renewal plan to celebrate Montreal’s 375th birthday. The winning entry convinced the client and international jury to rethink the relationship between mankind and nature as well as use the renovation to bolster the centre’s social mission to educate the public. The Biodome is an integral member of Space for Life, a series of museum pavillons that showcase to the public natural sciences, including an insectarium, a botanical garden and a planetarium, which are all located within the Olympic Park in the East side of Montreal. Each year Space for life receives over 1.7 million visitors including many tourists, educational camps and schools, making it one of Canada’s most important museum complexes.
On June 24 took place the inauguration of the new Pierre Lassonde pavilion of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, whose architectural conception started in 2011. It is with a tremendous sense of pride that Provencher_Roy assists to the opening of the doors to this building that imparts a newfound architectural cohesiveness to the Musée and enables Québecers and tourists alike, thanks to a 90% increase in exhibition space, to discover in greater depth the MNBAQ’s impressive art collection.
Today the Musée d’art de Joliette is recognized as Quebec’s most important regional art museum. While pursuing the objectives of conservation, dissemination and research established over half a century ago by its founders, the Musée continues to expand its permanent collection, which currently comprises some 8,500 works held in four collections: Canadian art, European art, contemporary art and archaeology.
Article source: MCKNHM Architects and Juliane Demel\
A simple concept of an architectural heart surrounded by radial arranged building wings, results in a design that minimizes the impact on a very delicate site for a museum extension in Mänttää Finland.
MCKNHM Architects main objective was to reduce the impact of the volume on the delicate site and to intertwine the building with the beautiful environment. Through the “heart and wings” concept the large building mass of 4700sqm is scattered around a central heart. The new building is split up into a number of squares that form a dialectic relationship towards the site and the existing Museum building. These square like building wings are arranged in a circle to form the central space, “the Heart” of the new Museum Extension. Joenniemi Manor, the existing museum building, is a very particular one of these wings as the tallest and oldest, its sublime presence is still untouched and engages in an interesting dialogue with the new clustered building addition that is cautiously connected by a barely visible underground passageway.
The concept for an art storage building references the spatial qualities of two world famous museums. These qualities are organized with the building typology of a library in mind. The final result is a CO2 neutral building that is blending into a delicate park in Brauweiler near Cologne, Germany.
The “Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci” was opened in 1988 and donated to the city of Prato by Enrico Pecci, in memory of his son who died at an early age. The museum is situated on the periphery of Prato, near the exit of the A11 highway, a strategic spot where, from the first floor, you can see the skyline of Florence, the city where tourism and ancient culture reign. On this spot however, two opposites dominate: (textile) industry and modern art. The art centre is one of the few museums in Italy that is devoted to modern art and furthermore, that possesses a superb collection which, for lack of exhibition space, is stored in various depots. To be able to display the invisible works of art it was decided to double the exhibition space and to solve two important problems with the new construction.
Location: Viale della Repubblica 277, Prato, Italy
Photography: Artribune, Augusto Biagini_Pratosfera, Federico Paoli, Ivan Aiazzi, Juza Photo, Lorenzo Gallo, Luca Rimatori, Luciana D’Agnano, Marco Di Domenico, Vittorio Giugni_Libera Mente
The site is located at Daebang-dong, where U.S. army base ‘Camp Grey’ had been located for 55 years until the retrocession in 2007. Located adjacent to this site was Seoul Women Shelter which accommodated prostitutes, runaway dementia elders, and vagrants from 1962 to 1998. The shelter was converted to Seoul Women Plaza. This is a symbolic place where tragic division of the Korean peninsula, poverty and hardships of woman in the era is accumulated and conveys the agony of Korean modern history. The purpose of this project to turn this gloomy and ‘deathlike’ space into a place of resurrection, a site of nurturing space that will foster welfare of women and families.
Embedded within the summit of Mount Kronplatz, 2,275m above sea level at the centre South Tyrol’s most popular ski resort, the Messner Mountain Museum Corones is surrounded by the alpine peaks of the Zillertal, Ortler and Dolomites. Established by renowned climber Reinhold Messner, the sixth and final Messner Mountain Museum explores the traditions, history and discipline of mountaineering.
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