THE PLAN 139, the fourth issue for 2022

THE PLAN 139, the fourth issue for 2022, offers readers a whole summer’s worth of inspirational architecture and design ideas. The cover is dedicated to Casa Oché, a project by Eovastudio and photographed by Fernando Alda.

The editorial was written by Coren Sharples, founding partner of SHoP Architects. Titled “Learning the Trade – The Future of Architectural Education in America,” the piece investigates the way in which the profession of architect is taught today. Beginning with the ways architecture has been taught (and passed down), Sharples offers four highly workable alternative approaches for the future.

In the Letters from America column, Raymund Ryan looks at the Tom Patterson Theater, a Stratford-style theater designed by Canadian firm Hariri Pontarini Architects that has the peculiarity of blending into its site to minimize its visual impact.

This issue also features the Viaggio in Italia column by Valerio Paolo Mosco, which looks at Lazzarini Pickering Architetti. Established in 1982, with offices in Rome, Milan, and Sydney, this studio has won numerous international awards. The article centers on The Bluff, a private home in Bedfordshire, England.

In Highlights, Michael Webb examines Casa A+M by Eric Owen Moss Architects, a house with sculptural forms in which the small details make a big difference. Still in the United States, we look at the Columbia Business School in New York, where Diller Scofidio + Renfro has designed two buildings with glazed curtain walls that mix student, teaching and admin spaces.

Located in La Línea de la Concepción, Spain, Casa Oché, by Eovastudio, is an essential project in which design and financial restraints were transformed into design opportunities. The work integrates with its neighborhood, a few blocks from the border with Gibraltar, through the use of local building techniques and materials.

Returning to the United States, we examine the Adidas East Village project in Portland, Oregon. The concept, born from collaboration between LEVER Architecture and Studio O+A, is clear: just as Adidas makes shoes to meet the needs of the people who wear them, the building has been designed according to the functions it will perform.

Closing the Architecture section is an article about the HC Ørsted Technical Institute. Designed by Sweco Denmark, its thirty classrooms have been conceived as technological and scientific playgrounds, in which architecture pays homage to science and reinvents the teacher-student relationship.

The issue closes with the Focus column, in which we examine the façade of the Church of St. Sarkis, in Carrollton, Texas, a project in which architecture and art give life to multiple visual levels, each nested inside the other, to be discovered pixel by pixel. The project is the work of David Hotson Architect.