威爾斯美語桃園分校

Google's developer conference, Google I/O 2015, begins on Thursday, and much of the agenda has been detailed already or hinted at in articles, leaks, or inadvertent disclosures.

Today we went to the largest technical museum in the western hemisphere – the Museum of Science + Industry, Chicago.

We added this museum primarily because of two exhibits – the wonderful Burlington Zephyr train, and the Spirit of America Land Speed Record car driven by Craig Breedlove. Add to that the U505 German submarine captured by the Americans in WWII – and you’d have to say that there’s a pretty world-class museum.

Brazil’s early, zealous adoption of Corbusian Modernism is a legacy that weighs heavily on its young architects, says Carolina Bueno, a partner of the Brazilian-French firm Triptyque. The formalist brio associated with Oscar Niemeyer remains the poster image of modern Brazil. But, as Bueno argues, apart from a few paroxysms—the quasi-Brutalism of João Batista Vilanova Artigas or Lina Bo Bardi’s earthy works—”Brazilian architecture has been sleeping ever since. Not exactly dead, but sleeping.”

If that’s the case, then Triptyque’s recently completed Groenlândia gallery could be read as a kind of mausoleum. Faced entirely in white marble, the building is hunkered down in São Paulo’s tony Jardim América neighborhood. Its corner edge is carved out in an act of transparency—the piano nobile is partly exposed to the street—that’s shocking for a city defined by security encampments for its wealthiest inhabitants. “Unfortunately, in São Paulo there is this enclosure type of architecture, walls behind walls,” Bueno says. “We don’t believe in that—we fought a lot not to have walls.”