The Musée International d’horlogerie (International Watchmaking Museum) in La-Chaux-de-Fonds could well be the first European experiment in contemporary troglodyte architecture as it was defined by Pierre Zoelly and Georges-Jacques Haefeli. It’s a buried building with remarkable spatial qualities supported by an efficient structure, constructed under a park in 1974.
Pierre Zoelly, a House for a Sculptor
At the end of the 1960s, the Swiss architect Pierre Zoelly designed a house for the sculptor Peter Hächler. He built a concrete structure, the organic heart of the house, which will be the perfect interlocutor for the sculptures it houses.
The Higüey Basilica, a Brutalist Cathedral in the Caribbean
After the Second World War an international competition was launched to build a basilica in the city of Higüey in the Dominican Republic. This city, which then had barely 10,000 inhabitants, saw the emergence of a monumental concrete cathedral at a time when its growing economic importance was just beginning.
Anastasis Church, Álvaro Siza
The Anastasis church, is a white concrete monolith designed by Alvaro Siza, built in the heart of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Lande in France. The sacred building is the first church built in the 21st century in Brittany, but it is also a modular place open to the life of the neighbourhood.
The Abandoned Gávea Tourist Hotel
The Gávea Tourist Hotel also known locally as Hotel Esqueleto (Skeleton Hotel) is located in the heights of Rio de Janeiro, between the districts of Gávea and São Conrado. It is a ruined hotel, abandoned and never completed, located near the Casa das Canoas de Niemeyer, almost lost in the forest between the mountains.
The Delta Works, The Oosterscheldekering
The Oosterscheldekering is the largest of the Delta Works dams and sturge barriers. This 9km long barrier was built between 1976 and 1986 to limit marine flooding following the North Sea Flood of 1953. It is the most famous work of the Delta Works because of its monumental size but also its innovative hydraulic technology and its complex and unique construction.
Kenzo Tange, Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium
For the 1964 Olympic Games, Japan invested huge amounts of capital in the construction of sports infrastructures. The architecture of the sports buildings gave the image of a modern nation, developed and more powerful than ever. The gymnasium architecture of Kenzo Tange can be considered as a manifesto of the modern Japanese architecture that revealed itself to the world during the Olympic Games.
Ghost-Town, the Abandoned Hotel Resorts in Sinai
Between 2002 and 2005, Haubitz + Zoche travelled the Sinai and documented abandoned hotel resorts. These ghost-towns are filled with unfinished hotel structures, isolated in the middle of the desert. Due to the instability of the region and dubious investments, these hotel sites were never completed. They are photographed as the sad consequence of a tourism policy of uncontrolled urban development. This series depicts a form of new archaeology, showing a bygone era, wich is the opposite of the pharaohs architecture.
Kirov Reservoir
The Kirov Reservoir is a reservoir located in the Talas region, in northern Kyrgyzstan. The main function of this construction is to control the irrigation of the land in the Talas Valley. The reservoir has a capacity of 550 million cubic meters, allowing to irrigate 55,000 ha of land between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
Metaphysical territories, Jean-Pierre Ugarte
Jean-Paul Ugarte is a French painter born in 1950. Born in Bordeaux, on the French coast, he was inspired at a very young age by the military architecture of the Atlantic Wall. He is a landscape painter, he represents air, nature, water and concrete. Jean-Paul Ugarte paints these metaphysical territories without humans, leaving room for interpretation.