by Yasemin Simesmen
Oluşturulma Tarihi: Mart 24, 2009 00:00
ISTANBUL - The latest environmentally friendly works by acclaimed Austrian architecture office Baumschlager Eberle are on display at the Milli Reasürans Art Gallery in Istanbul. The exhibition ’Architecture Sustain’ to run until April 4.
Buildings that preserve the world we live in and its limited resources are on display at the Milli Reasürans Art Gallery in Istanbul’s Nişantaşı district, in the form of sketches, photographs and scale models of the work of the world-renown architectural office Baumschlager Eberle. The exhibit, "Architecture Sustains," runs until April 4.
"For us, energy saving and sustainability are the most important issues [when designing a building]," said Carlo Baumschlager, a partner in the architectural firm who came to Istanbul for the exhibition’s opening. "This is something we learned when we were young, because we come from a region in Europe where people are not rich, so they are careful [with their money] and they have to think about what is necessary for them."
Project in Bodrum
Based in Austria, Baumschlager’s award-winning firm has worked around the globe, from China to Switzerland and Germany to a current project in the Turkish town of Bodrum. The projects they develop and build include residential and public housing units as well as office buildings.
Every five or six years, Baumschlager Eberle organizes an exhibition to showcase its most recently completed projects, as well as a few that are still under construction or being designed. "We always have a theme for our exhibitions," said Baumschlager. "The theme here is sustainable architecture. But we think everything we build is sustainable."
Baumschlager believes the exhibition successfully shows the wide range of projects his architectural office works on: "There are different scales; it includes small and big buildings. It includes the urban situation and the non-urban situation, the whole field of work we do."
An accompanying book further illuminates the office’s working process and contains two parts of the exhibition that had to be left out of the Istanbul show due to space constraints. "The first is software we developed that shows us how sustainable a buildings is," said Baumschlager. "The second is a social component in housing throughout the history of the office. Housing is the most important thing we do."
Baumschlager said most of the works in the exhibition are completed and that only a few are under construction or still at project level. "Our previous exhibitions would only showcase our completed projects. The books that are on display at the exhibition are also new; one can see how we work and the process involved."