Having started with the 8th member of the Chicago Seven, David Chipperfield, a couple of weeks ago, I thought we should go back to number 1 – Stanley Tigerman.

Stanley Tigerman (1930-2019) was an American architect, theorist, and designer. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – but did not pass. After several career changes and apprenticeships, he was accepted at the Yale School of Architecture and obtained a Masters degree. In 1961 he established Stanley Tigerman and Associates Ltd. In 1976 he became one of the members of the Chicago Seven. A group that, as I mentioned previously, was opposed to the modernist movement popular with the followers of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He was the unofficial chief of the Chicago architects. Tigerman is credited with 450 design projects and 175 built works.


Daisy House
1972, Porter Beach, Indiana




Black Barn
1974, Frog Hollow, Michigan




Hot Dog House
1974, Harvard, Illinois




Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
1976, Chicago, Illinois




House with a Pampadour
1980, Dunes, Indiana




Self Park
1986, Chicago, Illinois




Powerhouse Energy Museum
1990, Zion, Illinois




Pacific Garden Mission
2007, Chicago, Illinois




Holocaust Museum & Education Centre
2009, Skokie, Illinois

Today we explore a construction style. The Diagrid. The diagrid is load bearing diagonal structure with diagonal and horizontal structures. It is most often steel, but can also be wood or concrete. It is decorative, structural, and reduces the need for interior supporting walls thus more open floor. The construction style uses less material, less welding is striking and aesthetically pleasing. It also allows for curved structures and benefits of a cost-saving by using less material. I think my favourite in this selection is the Atlas Building. The most famous of course is St Mary Axe aka “The Gherkin”.


St Mary Axe “Gherkin”
2004, London, England




Seattle Library
2004, Seattle, Washington




Atlas building
2006, Wageninger, Netherlands




Hearst Tower
2006, New York, New York




Tornado Tower
2008, Doha, Qatar




170 Westhafen Tower
2009, Frankfurt, Germany




Aldar Headquarters Building
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates




Guangzhou International Finance Centre
2010, Guangzhou, China




Capital Gate
2013, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates




CCTV – China Central Television HQ from China World Trade
2013, Beiging, China




The Bow
2013, Calgary, Alberta




Leadenhall Building
2014, London, England




170 Amsterdam
2015, New York, New York




Poly International Plaza
2016, Chaonyang Qu, China

Sir David Alan Chipperfield is an English architect, born in London in 1953. Chipperfield graduated from the Kingston School of Art in London in 1976. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London. He has worked with many celebrated architects: Douglas Stephen, Norman Foster, and Richard Rogers. He established David Chipperfield Architects, in 1985. The firm has offices in London, Berlin, Milan, and Shanghai.

“Rowan Moore, the architecture critic of The Guardian of London, described his work as serious, solid, not flamboyant or radical, but comfortable with the history and culture of its setting. “He deals in dignity, in gravitas, in memory and in art.”


River and Rowing Museum
1997, Henley on Thames, UK




Americas Cup Building
2006, Valencia, Spain




Des Moines Public Library
2006, Des Moines, Iowa




Museum of Modern Literature
2006, Marbach, Germany




Neues Museum
2009, Berlin, Germany




City of Justice
2011, Barcelona, Spain




The Hopworth Wakefield
2011, Wakefield, UK




Turner Contemporary
2011, Margate, Ken, UK




Museo Jumex
2013, Mexico City, Mexico




Saint Louis Art Museum
2013, Saint Louis, Missouri

Having started the exploration of the Chicago Seven last week with Helmut Jahn, considered the 8th member, I think we should now to see who the original Chicago Seven members were. We’ll start with Thomas H. Beeby.

Beeby was born in Chicago, Oak Park to be more precise, in 1941. He received his bachelor’s degree at Cornell University then his Master’s degree at Yale. With James Hammond, he founded Hammond Beeby & Associates in 1971. He taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology and later became dean of the Yale School of Architecture. The Chicago Seven challenged modern architecture in the 1970s and 1980s. It wasn’t so much the modern style of Mies Van der Rohe they didn’t like, but more his followers they objected to. They changed the spirit of architecture in Chicago. [Read more…]

Helmut Jahn was a German-American architect. Born in 1940 in Zirndorf, Germany his father was schoolteacher and his mother a housewife. He started his architecture studies at the Technical University of Munich then at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He joined Charles Francis Murphy’s architecture firm in 1967, eventually taking sole control and renaming the firm Murphy/Jahn. He was the 8th member of the Chicago Seven (something else we’ll need to explore). Jahn died in a bicycle accident near his home 2021. This blog post on dezeen features a short documentary on Helmut Jahn “In a Flash”


Messeturm
1991, Frankfurt, Germany




One American Plaza
1991, San Diego, California




Caltex House
1993, Singapore




Hitachi Tower
1993, Singapore




Cologne Bonn Airport
2000, Cologne, Germany




Deutsche Post Tower
2003, Bonn, Germany




Munich Business Hower
2003, Munich, Germany




IIT Student Housing
2003, Chicago, Illinois




Veer Towers
2010, Paradise Nevada




Wesser Tower
2010, Breman, Germany




Joe and Rika Mansueto Library
2011, Chicago, Illinois




Cosmopolitan
2013, Twarda, Warsaw




5 West Street
2016, New York, New York




Thyssenkrupp Test Tower
2017, Rottweil, Germany

Raymond Moriyama was born in 1929 in Vancouver. In youth, confined to his room after suffering burns to his face, Moriyama kept seeing an architect coming and going at a nearby project. It was then that he decided to become an architect.

As Japanese Canadians were considered a possible threat during the Second World War, Moriyama spend some time with his family in an internment camp, he describes his first architecture project:

“In despair, I decided to bathe in the Slocan River on the other side of a little mountain away from the camp. The water was glacial, but it was better than hot tears. To see who might be coming, I built an observation platform. Soon I found myself wanting to build my first architectural project, a tree house, without being found out by the RCMP. I used just an axe as a hammer, an old borrowed saw, six spikes, some nails, a rope, and mostly branches and scraps from the lumberyard. It was hard work building it by myself, and it was a lesson in economy of material and means. That tree house, when finished, was beautiful. It was my university, my place of solace, a place to think and learn.”

Moriyama obtained his bachelor’s degree at the University of Toronto and his master’s degree at the School of Architecture at McGill University


Ontario Science Centre
1964, Toronto, Ontario




Ottawa Civic Centre
1968, Ottawa, Ontario




John McCrea Senior Public School
1969, Scarborough, Ontario




A.Y. Jackson Secondary School
1970, North York, Ontario




Lamoureux Collegiate Institute
1978, Scarborough, Ontario




Sarborough Civic Centre
1973, Scarborough, Ontario




Albert Campbell Collegiate Institute
1976, Scarborough, Ontario




Toronto Reference Library
1977, Toronto, Ontario




Peterborough Public Library
1980, Peterborough, Ontario




Science North
1980, Sudbury, Ontario




Ottawa City Hall
1990, Ottawa, Ontario




Embassy of Canada
1991, Tokyo, Japan




Bata Shoe Museum
1995, Toronto, Ontario




Nova Scotia Community College
1999, Halifax, Nova Scotia




Seneca York Campus
1999, Toronto, Ontario




Canadian War Museum
2005, Ottawa, Ontario




Should you wish to know more about Raymond Moriyama watch this tvo docs video.

Here we are just slightly past mid January. And in true January form the cold has set in and the snow, well the snow. So I thought, lets have fun! Let’s look at architecture with colour! I stumbled upon a pic of a building by Freddy Mamani on Pinterest. At first I was more amused and admittedly perhaps horrified at what seemed rather kitsch.

Then I started to search for more pictures and read about Mamani. A former bricklayer he eventually studied Civil Engineering at UBI if only to be taken more seriously. Mamani was born in Catavi, Bolivia in 1971. He is very conscious of developing a style that reflects the Bolivian culture, more so than any other Bolivian architect, the style has been given the name of Neo-andean. With the public he has acquired more accolades than established architects – and getting a very negative reaction in the process from his peers.

The facades of his buildings are called transformer, cholas, or cholets. Mamani had wanted to make “an architecture that spoke an Andean language since what is taught in universities has nothing to do with it”

“Some of the forms have been taken out of Andean art. Mamani uses the Andean cross, the diagonal juxtaposition of the planes, the duplicity, the repetition, the circle, which makes all this a stylization theme, that is its source.”

He has built several dance halls, the buildings follow a typical layout. The ground floor is commercial, the second is the dance hall, above the dance hall are apartments that can be leased and above that is the owners house. The owners may be portion similar in colour and may well be quite different in style, shape, and size.





















































And if you enjoyed our visit with Manami, perhaps you’ll enjoy this documentary.

Here we are at the last installment of architects who contributed to Arch Daily’s list of The 25 Tallest Buildings in the World. This time Dar Al-Handasah Consultants. Dar was founded in 1956 by Kamal Shair (1930-2008) and 3 fellow professors of Engineering from the American University of Beirut. Their fields of expertise include engineering, architecture, planning, environmental consulting, project and construction management, facilities management, and economics. Their principal offices are in Beirut, Cairo, London, Pune, and Amman. They provide consultancy services to clients globally. Their Arabic name دار الهندسة Dar Al-Handasah means “the house of engineering”.

Previously, from this list, we visited with:

• Wilkinson Eyre
• Skidmore Owings Merrill
• Wong Tung & Partners
• East China Architectural Design & Research Institue (ECADA)
• Mulia Group
• Wong Tung & Partners
• Atkins
• Gorproject
• Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill
• Chu-Yuan Lee

We’ve skipped over Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) as we’ve previously covered them when we looked at Starchitect William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF). That being said their contribution to this list is Suzhou IFS. We’ve also visited with Cesar Pelli & Associates whose contribution to this list is The Petrona Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 1998

Dar’s contribution to the list is Makkah Royal Clock Tower, the tallest building with a clock face in the world


Abraj Al Bait
2012, Mecca, Saudi Arabia




Smart Village Offices
2015, Egypt




Coca Cola Stadium
2019, Dubai, United Arab Emirates




Abraj Kudai Saudi Arabia
Mecca, Saudi Arabia




Al Bayt Stadium
2022, Al Khor, Qatar




Al Khor Stadium
2022, Al Khor, Qatar

Next in our list of architects named in Arch Daily’s list of The 25 Tallest Buildings in the World is Chu-yuan Lee. It seems odd to me that so little can be found about Chu-yuan Lee. Lee is a Taiwanese architect. Born in December 1938. He studied at the National Cheng Kung University and Princeton University.

Previously, from this list, we visited with:

• Wilkinson Eyre
• Skidmore Owings Merrill
• Wong Tung & Partners
• East China Architectural Design & Research Institue (ECADA)
• Mulia Group
• Wong Tung & Partners
• Atkins
• Gorproject
• Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill

We’ve skipped over Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) as we’ve previously covered them when we looked at Starchitect William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF). That being said their contribution to this list is Suzhou IFS. We’ve also visited with Cesar Pelli & Associates whose contribution to this list is The Petrona Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 1998

Lee’s contribution to the list is Taipei 101. Between 2004 and 2010 Taipei 101 was the tallest building in the world.


Yuda International Trade Centre
1998, Henan, China




Chung Tai Chan Monastery
2001, Puli, Taiwan




Taipei 101
2004, Taipei, Taiwan




Glory Tower
2007, Taiwan




Pangu 7 Star Hotel
2008, Beijing, China




Taipei Bus Station
2009, Taipei, Taiwan




Farglory Financial Center
2012, Taipei, Taiwan




Farglory The One
2019, Kaohsiung, Taiwan