Henri Ciriani (Contemporary World Architects) - Softcover

Ciriani, Henri; Guerra, Lucas H.; Ojeda, Oscar Riera

9781564962348: Henri Ciriani (Contemporary World Architects)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564962342 ISBN 13: 9781564962348

Publisher: Rockport Pub, 1997

Selected for publication by a prestigious board, the architects and firms featured in the Contemporary World Architects series are recognized for their superior expertise, as well as their innovation, creativity, sensibility, and vision.

Born in 1937, Henri Ciriani combines teaching and architectural practice in Paris since 1969. He got international recognition in 1980 with his first built housing project, Noisy II on the outskirts of Paris. He has recently completed two museums in France as well as teaching full time. He has been a visiting professor in London, Dublin, Philadelphia, and Amsterdam and was awarded National Grand Prix of Architecture in 1983.

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From the Back Cover:

Henri Edouard Ciriani was born in Peru in 1936 and received his training in architecture in Lima. After graduating at a very early age, he worked with the Instituto Nacional de la Vivienda, a goverment town planning organisation, executing several large-size projects. In the early sixties at Ventanilla, Matute and San Felipe, the democratic Peruvian government created a real laboratory for territorial experimentation, based on themes and methods belonging to the modern movement's building conceptions. In these early executions Ciriani already began concentrating on the elaboration of complexity from simple architectural elements, often connected with traditional components of the home, taken apart and put back together in a contemporary organism.

From then on, roads, public space, the typological complexity and social quality of architecture remain a system the author would never give up, refining his building research towards an increasingly intentional spatial quality of organisms, to be consciously filtered into a rich plasticity of the building.

After an extended briefing tour through Europe in the mid-sixties, he moved to Paris, worked with the Gornis studio, then was associated with the architect Borja Huidobro and the landscape designer Michel Corajoud until the mid-seventies. Those were the days of the great competitions for the 'villes nouvelles', where Ciriani worked in association with the A.U.A. and, occasionally, with Ricardo Bofill. The designs for Dunkirk, l'Isle d'Abeau and Evry drafted between 1971 and 1975 were an essential passage for his territorial research, maturing an ever-closer connection between urban form and architectural form.

Ciriani opened his own studio in 1975, working on public housing programmes, completing a theoretic reflection on the intermediary scale between plan and project that he would call the 'little utopia of the urban pi�ce, the fragment having a dimension allowing to study road layout together with the type and its tectonic development.

Noisy II, the Cour d'Angle and the nonexecuted Chamb�ry design are the most significant undertakings of that period. Taking an active part in the international debate in countless competitions, Ciriani, while reflecting on the housing fabric made a substantial contribution to the theme of collective building, where his critical research on the spatiality of the modern legacy appears with greater visibility. The nursery schools at St. Denis and Torcy and the museums of P�ronne and Arles express an ever greater care in defining the decomposition of the building, to make it adhere to its contextual problems without relinquishing its typological specificity. The defining of the 'tyical-atypical' concept with which Ciriani articulates the parts of the building, between 'typical' elements that still belong to function and 'atypical' ones that can be plastically connected with context, remains an important methodological approach for defining a trend of architectural composition freed from the analogical legacy. Decomposition produces a reflection on methods of connection, leading Ciriani to work on the continuity of built bodies, with highly interesting morphological and plastic approaches, such as the latest designs under way for the INRIA centure and the Pontoise Court of Law.

Mauro Galantino was born in Bari in 1953 and graduated in Composition at Florence in 1979. After winning a scholarship he lived in Paris from 1981 to 1983. At that time he studied the urban aspects of the latest French planification while collaborating with the Piano, Chemetov, Devillers studios in drafting competitions. On the occasion of the project for the bicentenary of the French Revolution he met Vittorio Gregotti, and then moved to Milan to work in his studio from 1983-1987. That same year he opened his own professional studio and began teaching at the Architecture School of Geneva, where he worked up to 1994. Since then he has been visiting professor at the University of Girona, the architecture schools of Strasborug and Paris Belleville, and the Lausanne polytechnic school, where he is presently visiting professor. He entered a number of international competitions, winning recognition in Berlin and in Vienna for the seats of Parliament, at Florence where he won and executed Europan 2, at Milan where he built a church. He is presently building serveral scholastic centres, at Arezzo, San Giovanni Valdarno and Arcore.

He has published critical essays on Criani, Gregotti, Michelucci and Braillard, and an essay on eighteenth-century urban development in Bath.

About the Author:

Oscar Riera Ojeda is an editor and designer who practices in the United States, South America, and Europe from his office in Boston. he is vice-director of the Spanish-Argentinian magazine Casa Internacional and is the creator of several series of architecture publications for Rockport Publishers, including Contemporary World Architects, Ten Houses, Single Building, and Art and Architecture. Other architectural publications include the new American series for the Whitney Library of Design, as well as several monographs on the work of renowned architects.

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