Archinect - News

AIANY Selects Seven Firms for New Practices New York 2012

2012-02-03T19:01:00-05:00

The AIA New York Chapter recently announced seven promising and pioneering new architecture and design firms from the New York area to receive the New Practices New York 2012 awards. The seven selected firms are: Holler Architecture; The Living; Abruzzo Bodziak; SLO Architecture; formlessfinder; Marc Fornes & THEVERYMANY; Christian Wassman.

Palais Stoclet | An Enchanted House Becomes a Family's Curse

2012-02-03T18:34:00-05:00

Now the Palais Stoclet, considered the best surviving realization of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art," faces an uncertain future as it marks its centennial. For the past decade this Jugendstil masterpiece has been a battleground for the four sisters who inherited it, even as they seek to protect the coveted private property from the ravages of decay, pollution, theft and the prying eyes of the public.

Drylands Design Conference

2012-02-03T17:57:00-05:00

...will re-examine the built environment of the arid and semi-arid west as a vast field of opportunities for design innovation at a range of scales, from building systems to infrastructure and landscape spaces. The conference will present and debate a portfolio of design strategies generated in response to the challenges set forth in ALI's Drylands Design Initiative...

Registration is currently open for the forthcoming Drylands Design Conference being held March 22-24 at the Woodbury School of Architecture. This event is the conference part of the Drylands Design Competition you can see the work by the winners at the competition website here http://drylandscompetition.org/

Portuguese Architect Paulo David Receives 2012 Alvar Aalto Medal

2012-02-03T17:41:00-05:00

The 2012 Alvar Aalto Medal was awarded to Portuguese architect Paulo David last night at the World Design Capital Gala in Lahti, Finland. In the view of the jury, David’s architecture forms a convincing synthesis of contemporary and traditional architecture.

'The Lens' Draws Sharp Comments at Town Hall Meeting

2012-02-03T17:07:00-05:00

About three-quarters of the people who spoke favored renovating the existing pier or picking a "Mediterranean-style" design for a replacement. The ultra-modern design of "The Lens" did not draw support from most of the people who spoke. "We are paying for $50 million for a sidewalk over the water," one commenter said. "I wanted Mediterranean style. (I) feel we are being locked into (a design) that doesn't have any local flavor."

John Pawson's Muse Music

2012-02-03T15:16:00-05:00

In a way, my influences are eclectic. Music doesn’t make me want to go and design a house, in a way it’s a more physical pleasure. It’s maybe a break for me or a tunnel to something else. I’ve never had a lot of music in the office. To me music is to be listened to and art is to be looked at. I never understood that thing of using art as decoration. It has to mean something to me otherwise I wouldn’t have it. And I can’t work with music. I find it too stimulating in a way.

Taiyuan Theater IV by Yaohua Wang Architecture

2012-02-03T15:03:00-05:00

Los Angeles architect Yaohua Wang - many may still remember his Nanjing Lab proposal - has sent us his latest project, a schematic design proposal for the experimental Xianghong Theater in Taiyuan, China.

Lindal Launches New ‘Architects Collaborative’ Prefab Home Line

2012-02-03T13:51:00-05:00

Lindal Cedar Homes has just launched their Lindal Architects Collaborative, an innovative new prefab home collection featuring designs from the world's leading architects. The line, which will feature prefab systems designed by 12 architects, will not only make modern design more accessible, but will make architecture previously reserved for the more affluent financially accessible to the masses.

While new firms will be added to the Collaborative each quarter throughout 2012 as they complete and introduce their designs, the first five have just been unveiled and include the likes of Marmol Radziner, Altius Architecture, Bates Masi + Architects, The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture Taliesin West (practicing professionals with graduate students), and Lindal Cedar Homes.

Is There a Jewish Architecture?

2012-02-02T20:13:00-05:00

Within the parameters of the building art there cannot be artists like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth or like Sidney Lumet and Woody Allen, who in books and movies probe the excruciating details of the Jewish encounter with American capitalism and lifestyle. Architecture cannot tell stories about one’s Jewish mother or one’s Jewish nose. Especially in the era of high modernism, architecture possessed limited expressive resources for detailed cultural critique.

Is there a type of Jewish architecture that unifies the work of Louis Kahn, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and Daniel Libeskind?

Architectural historian Mitchell Schwarzer reviews Gaven Rosenfeld's ambitious book, Building After Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust, and comes away unconvinced.

Video: The making of the Metropol Parasol

2012-02-02T18:22:00-05:00

This film explores how the Metropol Parasol affects the people who live and work around it, as well as the historic area in which it sits. The Metropol Parasol is one of the largest wooden structures in the world and was completed in April 2011. It has become a new centre for Seville. The Metropol Parasol was designed by Architect, J. MAYER H., with engineering consulting from Arup.

The New French Hacker-Artist Underground

2012-02-02T18:00:00-05:00

Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.

Why jobs require cities

2012-02-02T17:48:00-05:00

If we’re going to find jobs in the U.S. and the rest of the world, they’re going to have to be found in exactly the area where China is finding them — tertiary industry, or services. How do you create service-industry jobs? By investing in cities and inter-city infrastructure like smart grids and high-speed rail. Services flourish where people are close together and can interact easily with the maximum number of people. If we want to create jobs in America, we should look to services...

Indy's Super Bowl Building Boom

2012-02-02T17:00:00-05:00

“I’m never trying to be disparaging to these other communities in any way,” says Bill Browne, a local architect on Indianapolis’ host committee who has looked at what other Super Bowl cities have done. “But we came away with the sense that they’re putting on an event. We’re certainly putting on an event here, but we are absolutely trying to transform a number of elements of our community as a part of this.”

MFAH hires Steven Holl Architects to design expansion

2012-02-02T16:36:00-05:00

The board's long-range planning committee chose Holl, based in New York City and Beijing, after reviewing site-specific concepts from three internationally known architecture firms, including Snøhetta and Morphosis, according to a statement from board chair Cornelia Long.

Oh, Moby...

2012-02-02T13:19:00-05:00

oh, to clarify: i’m not saying the architecture is relatively pointless, i’m merely suggesting that my blog is relatively pointless. the architecture is anything but pointless, it’s great, even when it’s banal and mundane. it’s my blogging that is relatively pointless. or so i believe. i guess i should work on my syntax.

Are US Muslims abandoning domes and minarets out of fear?

2012-02-02T11:05:00-05:00

"You can have a grand dome and grand minaret, but if it doesn't really serve the purpose, if it only has a large prayer space and nothing else, then you're not really fulfilling the needs of the community," he says.

In post 9/11 America the construction of new mosques in the US has sometimes sparked controversy and even confrontation. Is that why some new Muslim houses of worship are being built without the most recognisable features of Islamic architecture - minarets and domes?

Term Limits: Mayor Bloomberg Wants 10 New Gehry Buildings in Two Years

2012-02-01T17:22:00-05:00

“You should know that Frank and I had a conversation backstage,” the mayor said at the opening of the Signature Theater today, “and we both committed to each other that we would get 10 more Frank Gehry projects going here—in the next 700 days. If my math is any good, Frank, that is one every 70 days, so we should meet some time later today to get going.”

Legendary Artist Mike Kelley Dead at 58, an Apparent Suicide

2012-02-01T15:25:00-05:00

Artist Mike Kelley has passed away at his home in Los Angeles, having apparently taken his own life. The tragic news was confirmed to BLOUIN ARTINFO by Helene Winer, of New York's Metro Pictures gallery, a long-time associate of the artist.

The tower and the glory: Terry Farrell's KK100

2012-02-01T14:49:50-05:00

Looming over the sprawling Chinese city of Shenzhen, this building is the tallest skyscraper ever designed by a British architect.

Building as Business

2012-02-01T13:08:00-05:00

Peter Gluck & Partners’s innovative approach to project delivery, “Architect Led Design Build”, is simple: the New York City-based firm acts as both the architect and the contractor. The client gets two separate contracts with different legal entities but the same people. A typical project goes from schematic design, directly to subcontractors who estimate cost and contribute useful information on alterations or alternatives.

A house built from more than a billion euros

2012-02-01T11:51:00-05:00

The house is constructed from sheets of plywood and frames donated by a local DIY shop. The outside walls are built from stacked bricks while inside, the shredded euros are used to plaster the walls and carpet the floor. It has a double glazed window, a high security front door and a toilet.

Artist Frank Buckley decided to express his anger about the property boom and bust by building a house from more than a billion euros of decommissioned notes.

Frank Gehry is working for free as architect of new Jazz Bakery

2012-02-01T00:35:00-05:00

Ruth Price, president and artistic director of the Jazz Bakery since it debuted in 1992, said Tuesday that she didn’t know Gehry, or even ask for his help, before he called about six months ago to volunteer his services. “He said, 'I’m doing this for two people: Sydney Pollack, and my wife, Berta.’ ” Film director Pollack, a close friend of the architect, died in 2008..."

Frank Lloyd Wright's Heller House is on the market for $2.5m

2012-01-31T18:08:00-05:00

Its astonishing 6,100 sq ft of outrageous opulence - including 33 stained glass windows, four fireplaces, several wood panelled walls, seven bedrooms and its very own working elevator - has allowed its residents to live in spectacular splendour for almost 120 years. Now prospective home-owners have the chance to buy into bliss as Chicago's luxurious Isodore H Heller House goes on the market for $2.5million.

Sasaki Associates, with RDG and AES, Wins Water Works Parkitecture Competition

2012-01-31T13:50:00-05:00

Des Moines Water Works, working in partnership with Iowa State University Department of Landscape Architecture, recently announced that Sasaki Associates, with RDG Planning & Design and Applied Ecological Services (AES), is the winning team of the Water Works Parkitecture Competition.

Spacious house on tiny lot? L.A. architect aims high in Echo Park

2012-01-30T20:54:00-05:00

“I never thought of this as a ‘house,'” Storey said. “It was designed to be a ‘container' of daily life. It made me realize there is work and there is life, but more often these are inseparable.”

4,114 Stoplights in Los Angeles and the Intricate Network that Keeps Traffic Moving

2012-01-30T20:00:00-05:00

Yu is a soft-spoken engineer with great power: He sets the timing for all of L.A.’s stoplights. His department has to take it all in: bikes, trains, big events and, of course, lots and lots of cars. Los Angeles has one of the nation’s worst reputations for automobile congestion, but that’s a simplistic way of looking at things. Its freeways are still the most congested in the nation, but L.A. has 36 times as many miles of surface streets as it does freeways.

Alien, Immigrant, Refugee: The Architecture of Hospitality

2012-01-30T18:52:00-05:00

Passage across a border wrenches us from a space of citizenship — where our individual being is cloaked in layers of legal protection — to a space where we experience at once freedom and nothingness. As architects and planners, we lack the language for describing this shift in the perception and socio-political dimension of place; for distinguishing between the place of the citizen and the place of the stranger within the space of the state.

In an essay on Places titled "Hospitality Begins at Home," architect and Pratt Institute professor Deborah Gans explores the spatial and political dimensions of being a stranger, particularly an immigrant or refugee. She reviews Maya Zack's Living Room exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York and the In-House Festival at the Jerusalem Season of Culture.

studio a+i is announced winner of the AIDS Memorial Park competition

2012-01-30T13:25:00-05:00

The act of memorializing the AIDS epidemic with a physical gesture goes beyond remembering and honoring the dead. AIDS is not a war, nor a disease conquered. There are no definite dates or victims. In our design process, we emphasize the changing and varied ways through which AIDS affects us personally and as a society. It is important to create a space that conveys our sense of solemn respect, remembrance and loss, without resorting to symbolism around a date, image, or names.

2012 Emerging Voices

2012-01-30T12:52:00-05:00

The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices lecture series and award spotlights individuals and firms with a distinct design ‘voice’ that has the potential to influence the discipline of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Since 1982, the juried series has featured architects and designers from throughout North America who have a significant body of realized work that not only represents the best of its kind, but also creatively addresses larger issues...

The 2012 Emerging Voices are:

5468796 architecture, Winnipeg
Manon Asselin and Katsuhiro Yamazaki, Atelier TAG, Montreal
Jose Castillo and Saidee Springall, arquitectura911sc, Mexico City
Jeffrey Inaba, INABA, Los Angeles and New York
Christos Marcopoulos and Carol Moukheiber, Studio NMinusOne, Toronto
Kate Orff and Elena Brescia, SCAPE / Landscape Architecture, New York
Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, Oyler Wu Collaborative, Los Angeles
Jinhee Park and John Hong , SsD, New York, Boston, and Seoul

The 10 Fastest-Growing (and Fastest-Declining) Cities in the World

2012-01-30T12:44:00-05:00

Shanghai is the fastest-growing city in the world, according to MetroMonitor, a quarterly analysis from the Brookings Institution that compares the 200 most prosperous metros by income and job growth. The victims of the euro zone crisis dominate the end of the list. Athens, Lisbon, and Dublin, the capitals of the three most endangered nations in Europe's sovereign debt crisis, made up the bottom three.