The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has officially opened the Morland Mixité Capitale building in the 4th arrondissemet. The 63,500m² complex, which involved the refurbishment, remodelling and the extension of the former Prefecture de Paris building has been renamed La Félicité Paris as part of the ceremony. The complex is the largest project within the mayor’s Reinventer Paris initiative which aims at reinventing 23 public spaces and buildings to offer a better quality of life in the city. It contains a mix of uses including market rate and social housing, a hotel and hostel, a food market and roof-top farming. It also showcases exemplary solutions to the pressing questions of sustainable urban design and has received several sustainability certificates.

Images © Simon Menges

On the occasion of opening of the Morland Mixité Capitale project in Paris last week, Neue Zürcher Zeitung correspondent Nina Belz spoke to David Chipperfield about the project as well as the Kunsthaus Zürich extension, which opened last year. David Chipperfield elaborates on what makes Morland Mixité Capitale so unusual and explains why it is only with government pressure and a robust planning system that private development can be expected to contribute meaningfully to the city.

Edinburgh City Council has unanimously approved planning permission and Listed Building Consent for the restoration of Jenners’ celebrated building on Princes Street. The project builds on the department store’s heritage and envisages a new combination of high-end retail and hospitality for Edinburgh. It seeks to re-establish the architectural quality of the original 1895 William Hamilton Beattie building and involves the sensitive restoration of important surviving features and the reinstatement of lost original elements.

Three buildings are now under development at Jannowitzbrücke in Berlin’s Mitte district, including a tower designed by David Chipperfield Architects Berlin. The ground-breaking for the overall project was celebrated in a ceremony on 16 June.

The new building forms a dialogue with its immediate urban context while its sculpted form generates a new urban landmark visible from afar. Landscaped areas including roof terraces and a new public square in front of the building form an integral part of the design of this energy-efficient high-rise. The tower is set to complete in 2025.

Responding to the London Festival of Architecture 2022 theme of ‘act’, David Chipperfield Architects hosted a public roundtable discussion at Hoxton Press – a project designed in collaboration with Karakusevic Carson Architects – to consider the evolving role of architecture in response to urgent social and environmental crises. David Chipperfield was joined in conversation by Liesbeth Huybrechts, Rory Olcayto, Amin Taha and Jane Withers, all of whom contributed to Domus magazine during David Chipperfield’s guest editorship in 2020.

The Mayor of London has appointed David Chipperfield as one of 42 new Design Advocates – independent experts whose role is to ensure quality buildings and public spaces that benefit all Londoners. The new cohort will support the updated Good Growth by Design programme, reflecting the importance of an inclusive recovery from a pandemic that has highlighted inequalities in the capital and the need to counter racism and other forms of prejudice in the built environment. The Design Advocates will work on three main objectives: quality, recovery and representation.

This publication is the outcome of an 18-month dialogue between David Chipperfield and Simon Kretz as part of the Rolex Mentor & Protégé programme.

The collaboration led to a theoretical exercise examining the forces that influence the shape of cities, using the Bishopsgate goods yard site in East London as a case study. Exploring this further with teams at ETH Zurich, they highlighted conditions under which an ideal urban development project could flourish.

Publications

This residential project, won in competition, is located at the south-west corner of the Colville Estate, a housing development in Hackney, east London, built in the 1950s. It forms part of Hackney Council’s programme of redevelopment across the borough that calls for around 2,500 new homes to be built over the coming years. Karakusevic Carson Architects was originally commissioned to develop a comprehensive masterplan, which was adopted in 2011. The two residential towers, 16 and 20 storeys respectively, form part of this masterplan and are intended for private sale to co-fund the larger redevelopment of the estate.

The 136-page publication is arranged by season through the work of photographer Risaku Suzuki who visited the cemetery over the course of a year. Suzuki’s images interleaf the texts which include an essay by Japanese author Toshiyuki Horie; a conversation between the photographer Thomas Struth, David Chipperfield and Hideyuki Osawa, Director of the Boenfukyukai Foundation; and reflections by Hideyuki Osawa and David Chipperfield on the ambitions and collaborative process of conceiving, designing and building the project. The book is designed by John Morgan studio and produced by the Boenfukyukai Foundation in collaboration with David Chipperfield Architects.

Inagawa Cemetery is located on a steep site in the Hokusetsu mountain range of Hyogo prefecture, approximately 40 kilometres north of Osaka. The cemetery is laid out across terraces and bisected by a monumental flight of steps leading up to a shrine at the highest point – an axis that orients the whole project.