Dagmar Richter

German born American architect Dagmar Richter is also an acclaimed author, designer and educator. Since 2012 Richter has been chair of the Department of Architecture at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.

Richter’s architectural work explores new solutions to the field of architecture and planning by its response to elements that are usually deemed inappropriate, irrelevant or undesirable, such as traces of a site’s history, contemporary photographs or drawings, and texts or verbal myths. She has had serial award-winning competition entries, urban design proposals and built projects. Three of Richter’s most important competition entries have been the West Coast Gateway, The New Government Centre in Berlin and The Copenhagen Royal Library where she won 2nd prize.

(The image above is taken from the proposal for a New Government Centre in Berlin, 1992. The diagram is an architectural copy of medical representation, stitching the city back together.)

Rather than using the concept of available space to ascertain the prior qualification of any zone, she substitutes the memory of the events comprising it. The immediacy of this archaeology constitutes the project’s basic material, in a renewed understanding of the urban approach. Beyond any post-modern assimilation, this relationship to history is directly material and tectonic, and it reconstitutes the ground in symbolic sedimentary layers which the architect then uses as a formal resource.

(Map displaying the collected traces over laid with a drawing of shadows of buildings and elevators projected to the ground, take from the ‘Re-Rendering the City: An Earthscratcher for Century City’, 1990 .)

With The Vessel her project for the Los Angeles Gateway competition, she explored the historical traces at the site and reconstituted a transparent wall above the motorway, which became an information panel at night. The city is at once the condensation traces of the past and their dissolution in the flow of traffic. It extends horizontally over here a highway which it follows the stretch. Platforms and volumes in the upper tier of the structure are dedicated to pedestrians while the lower level of this artificial landscapes, plays of light and shadow.

 

(Working diagram showing the layered traces and shadows of the clearance site, again taken from the 1990 project Re-Rendering the City .)

21 Nov This entry was published on November 21, 2014 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Architecture and Architects, Case Studies. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.