With no casualties, last week's fire at the Glasgow School of Art, which caused significant damage to parts of the building and gutted Charles Rennie Mackintosh's canonical library room, will be remembered as a tragic event that robbed us of one of the best examples of Art Nouveau of its time. The intention of the Glasgow School of Art is to restore the building in the hope that in generations to come, the fire will be all but forgotten, a strategy which has been largely well received by the profession.
However, in the case of other fires things have not gone so smoothly: for millennia, fire has played a big role in determining the course of architectural history - by destroying precious artifacts, but often also by allowing something new to rise from the ashes. Read on after the break as we count down the top 10 fires that changed the course of architectural history.
Check out this rare footage that captures Le Corbusier as a “young man of 71-years-old” surrounded by paintings and discussing his work, poetry and the "ideal city" within his 1933, self-designed Paris flat.
When you're surrounded by buildings on all sides, what do you see? In his SkyArt series, French artist Lamadieu Thomas gives us his answer. He takes claustrophobia-inducing photographs of urban landscapes through a fish-eye lens, framing the sky with rooftops and filling the negative space with playful illustrations. Thomas describes his whimsical approach to art as an attempt to show "what we can construct with a boundless imagination" and "a different perception of urban architecture and the everyday environment around us." To see more from the collection, continue after the break.
In this four-part, stop-motion series, Mayeul Akpovi presents a new perspective on the City of Lights. Filmed with manual camera movements and composed of more than 30,000 photographs, the videos enable a unique, otherwise-unattainable experience of Paris’ sleepless urban spaces by ceaselessly attenuating the passage of time.
Watch part one (above), and continue after the break for the remaining series...
After a nine-month long competition, LAN Architecture has been commissioned to restructure and extend the historic Grand Palais in Paris. With the intent to “restore the building’s original coherence and sense of transparency,” LAN plans to revamp the 1900 World’s Fair building by resorting its unity and circulation, as well as the volume of its galleries around the Grand Nave and the addition of a new entrance court.
Review the plan in more detail, after the break...
.jpg?1400477879 "© Michel Denancé")
.jpg?1400499040 "© Takuji Shimmura")
.jpg?1400478659 "© Michel Denancé")
.jpg?1400498606 "© Takuji Shimmura")
.jpg?1399346187&format=webp&width=640&height=580)
.jpg?1399346088 "© Nicolas Borel")
.jpg?1399346077 "© Nicolas Borel")
.jpg?1399346130 "© Nicolas Borel")
.jpg?1399346187)
