Scandinavian Architecture

Architect Bruno Milić (1917-2009) designed one of the first multi-apartment high-rise building in the city of Nikšić, the Meander Building, in 1958. Built in a modernist manner with a strong respect for the context, the Meander Building has a characteristic shape that is unique not only in Montenegro, but also further afield. The traditional elements of Nikšić’s city architecture are presented in a new way in the Meander Building without losing its own identity.

Through the analysis of more than 300 drawings, most of them never published before, held by the Archive of the Design Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and thanks to fieldwork and the oral testimony of acquaintances of Juhl, the study brings together for the first time the work of the architect and designer Finn Juhl, in order to introduce him in the Italian context.
Before this publication, very little has been said on Finn Juhl in Italy. While everyone gets to know figures like Alvar Aalto, Erik Gunnar Asplund, Arne Jacobsen and Jørn Utzon, many Danish designers are almost unknown by Italian people. There is no monograph on Finn Juhl written in the Italian language, although he is one of the greatest and most influential designers of the Danish Modern who theorised an own vision of domestic space and interior design for single-family houses.
More than a considerable furniture designer, Finn Juhl has been also a talented architect and one of the promoters of the Danish design all over the world. Thanks to his friendship with Edgar Kaufmann Jr, son of the owner of the Waterfall by F. L. Wright, and to his exhibitions during the 50s, Juhl became famous in Europe and in the USA, but remained unknown in Italy, where his popularity concerns mostly the IX, X and XI Triennale in Milan. The first articles on Juhl in Italian date back to 1950, describing his own house in Ordrup, built almost 7 years earlier. Moreover, there is no work published about the other villas he designed from the beginning of the 40s till the end of the 60s in Denmark, such as Villa Aubertin, the Summer House in Asserbo, the Summer House in Raageleje and the Projects in Klelund.
The aim of this dissertation is in the first place to describe Juhl’s domestic architectural projects, in order to introduce them to the public, then to critique, more broadly, his design in relation to the world of arts and furniture design, referring to his contemporaries and to others who may have influenced him.

Alvar Aalto's City Hall Complex and library in Saynatsalo, Finland. As part of my Scandinavian trip on Midsummer's night, I got to visit the complex with few people around and long days.
i had read about the complex in textbooks but seeing it in person gave better appreciation for its setting, materials and massing  .

New building projects have increasingly been offering publicly accessed outdoor spaces, transforming the interfaces between the building and the city into soft edges. This approach is especially evident in the latest projects in Copenhagen. This design apprehension is considered to be in relation to the increasing emphasis on public space, changing roles of private and public entities in the production and maintenance of space, the urban policies of Copenhagen as well as the inclusive approach of the designers. The study aims to evaluate this new kind of architectural design approach where the boundaries between the city and the building blur and the edge turns into a public space serving to a wider public. The study examines five projects from Copenhagen (BLOX/DAC, Maersk Tower, Axel Towers, CopenHill and Red Cross Volunteer House), based on the criteria derived from the urban policies of Copenhagen (that owes significantly to Jan Gehl) targeted towards 2025 to analyze the spatial configuration of the edges as well as the success of the public spaces introduced within the projects. The results of the analyses demonstrate different patterns of publicness in different projects as well as in different parts of the same project. Nonetheless, the projects in question can be considered as successful soft edges offering vivid urban life by blurring the boundaries between the building and the city.

presented at: "Sicily through foreign eyes: travelling architetti / La Sicilia nello sguardo degli altri: architetti in viaggio" , Università degli Studi di Catania - Struttura didattica di Siracusa, ITALY, May 18 -19, 2017



http://www.agenda.unict.it/12856-la-sicilia-nello-sguardo-degli-altri-architetti-in-viaggio.htm

Salama, A. M. (2008). Selected Scandinavian Contributions to Contemporary Architectural Discourse. Archnet-IJAR-International Journal of Architectural Research, Volume 2, Issue 1, PP. 264-269. ISSN # 1938 7806

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In the following brief reviews I present two publications and a book that represent arguments and discussions which go beyond the main stream debate on architecture and its allied disciplines. The three pieces come from Scandinavia and in fact can be seen as catalysts for generating discussions that focus on new ways in which knowledge about the built artifacts can be further enhanced.