Atelier Vens Vanbelle has extended a notary’s office it completed five years ago in the Belgian village of Horebeke, adding mirrored walls that reflect both the original building and its pastoral setting (+ slideshow). (more…)
via. Dezeen
Patronage, vision and design excellence
As Sir Barnett Cocks of the United Kingdom’s House of Commons once said, “A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.”1 Committees, unsurprisingly, rarely deliver fine architecture – great buildings are more often the product of one or two strong players working assiduously towards a shared vision. The recent announcement of The Naomi Milgrom Foundation’s MPavilion for Melbourne is indicative of a new level of private support for architecture in the public realm, lead not by a committee, but by an individual with a strong and commendable vision.
At the announcement of the MPavilion project in July, the project’s initiator, Naomi Milgrom AO, clearly acknowledged that its inspiration derives from the Serpentine Pavilion in London, where, each northern summer, a world-famous architect is invited to design an inspired garden “folly”: a special, rather personal architectural statement realized with few constraints. An MPavilion will be constructed each spring from 2014 until 2017 in the Queen Victoria Gardens, located across the road from the National Gallery of Victoria. The pavilions, to be individually designed by a celebrated architect, will then be relocated elsewhere each summer and re-used for community purposes.
via. ArchitectureAU Latest