Someone Has Built It Before

The Parthenon is a temple in the Athenian Acropolis, Greece, dedicated to the Greek goddess Athena.

The Parthenon…enjoys the reputation of being the most perfect Doric temple ever built. Even in antiquity, its architectural refinements were legendary, especially the subtle correspondence between the curvature of the stylobate, the batter, or taper, of the naos walls and the entasis of the columns.”

From  John Julius Norwich, ed. Great Architecture of the World. p63

The Parthenon

 Acropolis,  Athens,  Greece

  started 447 BC – completed 432 BC

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Oscar Niemeyer Architect 

  Mondadori’s head office

   Segrate, just outside Milan -  Inaugurated in 1975 

The building complex is composed of three elements. The five floors of the main building are suspended within a parallelepiped, fronted by a series of arches and containing offices and newsrooms. This is set against two low, sinuous structures that emerge from a stretch of water. Their irregular and wave-like forms, which resemble that of a leaf, are made even more suggestive by a 20,000 square-metre artificial lake. The building is surrounded by a large park, laid out by landscape architect Pietro Porcinai.

From  Mondadori’s Website

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 David Chipperfield  architect 

 Museum of Modern Literature , Marbach, Germany

  Completed  6 June 2006

The Stirling Prize for 2007 has been awarded to the Museum of Modern Literature. With a spare colonnade around its boxy, minimalist form, the Museum is something of a neoclassical Parthenon 

In its October 6 announcement, the jury commended the project’s “rich but selective palette of materials,” which includes fair-faced concrete, sandblasted reconstituted stone, limestone, felt, glass, and wood, with dark timber paneling in the exhibition galleries.

“This is a building that is simultaneously rich and restrained, a trick Chipperfield pulls off as well as any architect working today. The architect’s control and discrimination in the choice of materials has by now become a signature but above all it is in the handling of the ‘difficult whole’ that the building excels.”

From Architectureweek 

Chipperfield’s Quote:

“There is a danger when every building has to look spectacular, to look like it is changing the world. I don’t care how a building looks if it means something, not to architects, but to the people who use it.”

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