January 6th, 2016: Mr. Luca Donner, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Canadian University Dubai (CUD), has been named among the 100 Architects of the Year 2015 by the Korean Institute of Architects (KIA), coinciding with an exhibition at Culture Station Seoul 284, which featured some of his unique design work.
Mr. Donner was recognized among the prestigious group of leading international architects for his design of the National Museum of Afghanistan, which brought together the country’s history, culture and landscape to create a new museum philosophy.
Now in its fourth year, the Architects of the Year listing seeks to showcase contemporary architectural philosophies and emerging design trends from across the globe, and to share architectural culture with wider society.
With a focus throughout his design work on embracing the surrounding landscape, incorporating cultural identity, and harnessing natural resources to promote sustainable development, Mr. Donner’s museum design adopted the site’s existing elements to build a close relationship between the building, its environment and its users.
Mr. Donner explained, “The analysis of the site and its urban and social context revealed the presence of certain salient morphological features, like the surrounding mountains and a dense urban fabric, dominating the context and conditioning the overall settlement structure.
“Using a ‘canyon’ model in the design, we not only represented the site’s two major morphological features (mountains and urban fabric), but also referred to the traditional Islamic courtyard as part of the simple rectangular figures of the local existing buildings, thus blending vernacular habits with natural landscape, integral to local traditions of construction.
“These features have been re-proposed in a new way, through the idea of discovering the museum and its treasures by the visitors; the break inside the building mass presents the opportunity to move deeper inside the historical cultural heritage.”
The design was also published in a book that accompanied the Seoul exhibition.
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