Articles by Paula Pintos

An ebullient structure seems to hover in the plaza of the newly renovated Valerie C. Woodard Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Pillars of Dreams is an icon to be experienced. The cloud-like pavilion is anchored to the ground on nine legs, which are part of the continuous aluminum surface that makes up the double-curving canopy overhead. These open pillars resolve into a field of clustered seating, establishing a public agora for visitors and employees. Along the path from parking to the main entrance, the pavilion accommodates friendly interaction as well as quiet moments for reflection. The airy structure offers relief from the sun but also casts dynamic light through its porous surface. The atmosphere within, full of color and dappled light, inspires curiosity, collegiality, and a renewed spirit of place.

When the landscape designer Michel Corajoud put forward his plan for improvements to the Roland Garros site for the international tennis tournament, his intention was to open it up, creating a link with the city. This necessitated opening up an extensive public space and the construction of a new court accommodating 5,000 visitors in the adjacent garden where not long before some poorly constructed greenhouses had been added. The garden is notable not for these greenhouses, but rather for its fine botanical hothouses designed in 1898 by Jean-Camille Formigé, and which were naturally never under threat.

The client’s brief was for a 40,000-seat football stadium for the 2022 World Cup which could be reduced to a 20,000-seat capacity in its legacy mode following the tournament. 20,000 seats are the optimum capacity for legacy use as the home ground to Al Wakrah Sport Club professional football team of the Qatar Stars national league. These temporary seats have been designed to be demountable and transportable to a developing country in need of sporting infrastructure for post-tournament usage. Further temporary accommodation such as concessions is required for the additional capacity of FIFA World Cup tournament mode. This has been built as a temporary overlay outside the permanent footprint and enclosure of the stadium in its legacy mode.

As technology moves forward, so does architecture and construction. Architects, designers, and planners around the world now have infinite tools and resources to design and build the cities of today and the future.  As promising as this may sound, new construction is also consuming our world’s limited resources faster than we can replenish them.

Located in Paris, on the rooftop of the Élysée Montmartre theater, a monument on the back Sacre Coeur, a contemporary office that brings out the charm of modernity joining the classical architecture that has fascinated the rest of the world for centuries.

The Macquarie University Incubator aims to amplify and imbue deep thinking around innovation, bringing together entrepreneurial spirit, ingenuity, and collaboration. The Incubator was conceived as a pair of pavilions, each with flexible layouts that lend themselves to future adaptations and functions with the facilitation of collaboration being the underlying principle.  The architecture is designed to be both a light touch and memorable, responding to the shallow falling site, the beautiful wooded context and Macquarie University’s aspiration to create a building that represents and encourages innovation.  The Incubator is a demonstration that Macquarie University is facilitating societal advancement through partnerships, research, invention, and high-quality architectural design.