Rachael Franceschina

Happy new year to you all! If you haven’t already, please check out Dezeen’s post of buildings to look forward to in 2015. From my Profile, you will know that my undergraduate degree is in architecture, so I link both the architecture of a building with its interior design. I was intrigued with the post, because the featured buildings adapt to their settings in several ways; they soften the harshness, disappear, imitate, or reuse existing buildings within their environments.

The organic facade of the Broad Art Gallery in LA attempts to soften the urban context of concrete streets and orthogonal buildings. The inverted cone structures of bamboo of the Vietnam Pavilion for Expo Milano also soften the surrounding quadrangular buildings. I love how the Lofoten Hotel in Norway creates a gentle curve up and down the rocky hills it is situated on.

This same, smooth flow can be found in the River at Grace Farms building in Connecticut; the long, graceful building disappears into the grassy knolls and trees. The lightweight roof of the Stade Bordeaux Atlantique defies gravity as the skinny, white columns gently lift the roof up to disappear into the sky.

The Huangshan Mountain Village creates it’s own mounds of apartment buildings that mimic it’s surrounding undulating Beijing landscape. The contemporary box structure of the Australian Pavilion in Venice, Italy imitates the concrete canal barriers, then elevates and leans over the water.

A clever adaptive reuse project, the Newport Street Gallery, depicts how the new expansion fits visually into the architecture of the neighborhood warehouse buildings. Another adaptive reuse project, The Architecture School for the Catholic University of Louvain, includes the reuse of a hospital in addition to a couple of warehouses. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Russia is another example of adaptive reuse.

The 2015 trend depicts an architecture that works with the existing surrounding environment.