Amanda Levete
- Site : www.ala.uk.com
- Adresse : 14A Brewery Road N7 9NH London
Amanda Levete CBE is a RIBA Stirling Prize winning architect and founder and principal of AL_A, an international award-winning architecture studio.
Since its formation in 2009, AL_A has refined an intuitive and strategic approach to design. Collaborating with ambitious and visionary clients, we develop designs that are conceptualised as urban projects not just buildings and projects that express the identity of an institution, a city or a nation. Recently completed projects include the Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition Road Quarter (2017) in London, the V&A’s largest building project in over 100 years; MAAT (2016), a Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, commissioned by EDP, one of the world’s foremost energy companies; Central Embassy (2017), a 1.5 million sq ft luxury shopping mall and hotel in Bangkok on the former grounds of the British Embassy; a 13-hectare media campus masterplan and a 37,700m2 headquarters building for Sky (2016) in London; and MPavilion 2015 in Melbourne.
Ongoing commissions around the world include the transformation of the flagship Galleries Lafayette department store on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris; a new centre for the cancer care charity Maggie’s in Southampton; two new buildings for Wadham College at the University of Oxford; the renovation and expansion of Paisley Museum; The Courtyard, a series of community mixed-use developments on 39 sites across Moscow; and the Monte St Angelo subway station in Naples.
For over a decade, Levete was a trustee of both leading social innovation centre the Young Foundation and the influential arts organisation Artangel. She is a regular radio and TV broadcaster, writes for a number of publications including the New Statesman and Prospect and lectures throughout the world. She is a Visiting Professor and formerly a MArch tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. In 2017 Levete was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday honours list and made a CBE for services to architecture and in 2018, was awarded the Jane Drew Prize.
Levete trained at the Architectural Association and worked for Richard Rogers before joining Future Systems as a partner in 1989, where she realised ground-breaking buildings including the Media Centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground and Selfridges department store in Birmingham.
|
Selfridges Birmingham
Our ambitious brief was not only to design a state of the art department store but also to create an architectural landmark for Birmingham so that the building itself would become a genuine catalyst for urban regeneration.
We have re-interpreted the notion of a department store, not just in its form and appearance but also in the social function such a building now plays in our society. Its relationship to the church is significant, representing the religious and commercial life of the city that have evolved side by side over hundreds of years. The building provides an ethereal backdrop to the Gothic architecture of St Martin’s and its closeness creates a powerful visual tension between church and department store. Glimpsed from the train entering Birmingham from the south, it promises mystery and excitement in a city undergoing a twenty-first century renaissance.
The fluidity of shape recalls the fall of fabric or the soft lines of a body, rises from the ground and gently billows outwards before being drawn in at a kind of waistline. It then curves out again and over to form the roof, in one continuous movement. The skin is made up of thousands of aluminium discs, creating a fine, lustrous grain like the scales of a snake or the sequins of a Paco Rabanne dress. In sunlight it shimmers, reflecting minute changes in weather conditions and taking on the colours, light and shapes of people and things passing by – an animate and breathing form.
|
