Glass

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Videos

In the quaint Dutch town of Den Bosch, amongst typical brick-clad homes and winding canals, sits the odd community of Bolwoningen: a cluster of globe-shaped stilt houses punctuated with round windows in a sea of wild vegetation. Built in 1984, these oversized “golf balls” are, in fact, homes: an eccentric product of a relatively unknown architectural experiment conducted by a visionary architect, attempting to impose a new morphological dwelling solution, and hoping to generate a new residential typology. Instead, the bizarre neighbourhood remains a secluded, momentary anecdote in architectural history, and today, provides a glimpse into an age of praised radicalism and irrepressible imagination.

More on these “oddballs” after the break.

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The Bibliotheca Alexandrina on Egypt’s Mediterranean Coast is a spectacular, state-of-the-art facility with an unresolved architectural identity. Commissioned in 1989 as a contemporary resurrection of the fabled Library at Alexandria once venerated throughout the ancient world, the present building was intended to serve as a city’s connection to history and heritage. But its stark modernity and technological innovations make it decidedly more forward-looking than historically referential, a cosmopolitan exploration of form and engineering perhaps longing for a stronger sense of regional belonging.

To some critics, the library has political overtones that obfuscate its architectural message, at worst acting as a monument to political posturing whose utility and conceptual integrity is only of secondary concern. And while critical scrutiny of the project necessitates its political and socio-historical contextualization, the building's architecture—the competition-winning design submitted by Norwegian firm Snøhetta—is worth appreciating and evaluating as an autonomous object and as a precedent for contemporary library design.

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