Archinect - News

A City for Books and Architecture in South Korea

2013-01-16T11:21:00-05:00

When I first heard of Paju Bookcity, I imagined a bibliophilic paradise of human-scaled buildings with legible facades nestled side-by-side like volumes on a shelf. When I traveled to the real Paju Bookcity, I found an industrial estate created by companies related to all aspects of book manufacturing, sited north of Seoul in the marshes near the Demilitarized Zone. But if Bookcity is not the fairy tale I envisioned, it is a kind of Cinderella story: this is the industrial park remade.

On Places, Shannon Mattern explores the ongoing remaking of Bookcity — which seeks to reinvent invent Korean publishing, architecture and urban planning — in the digital era.

Architecture in Children's Books and Fairy Tales

2012-12-19T17:36:00-05:00

Even the smallest architectural design proposes to make an intervention in the known world, it dares to change things as they are, and to venture how they might be. It envisions a possible future, sometimes a fantastic one, and then sets out to make it manifest. If that’s not a rich subject for children’s books, I don’t know what is. But such books should also make us question what we want architecture and architects to be. Not just in fairy tales, but in real life.

For generations children's books have told fanciful stories about the creation of houses and the comforts of domesticity. "When you go looking," writes Naomi Stead on Places, "you realize that there is a huge, even dominant genre in children’s literature: stories about houses, about the choice of a house, the quality of homeliness, and the very concept of home." Stead surveys the scene, from Iggy Peck to Roberto, from The Little House to House by Mouse, and wonders what these books tell us "about the architecture profession and how it is conceived and represented in culture more broadly."

In related features, Places continues an ongoing series on fairy tale architecture, with new designs by Abruzzo Bodziak ("Snowflake"), Bernheimer Architecture ("The Little Match Girl"), and Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO – IL) ("Monkey King").

N.Y. Public Library, Norman Foster Evict a Million Books

2012-12-19T12:20:00-05:00

A $300 million renovation of the New York Public Library’s ornate marble palace in midtown Manhattan will start by evicting 1.2 million books. The plan, unveiled today and overseen by the London firm of Foster & Partners, keeps more books onsite than had been suggested in earlier proposals. Books will be stored in space under Bryant Park and in a Princeton, New Jersey, facility.

Pharrell Talks Jean Prouvé, Gio Ponti, Zaha Hadid, And “Other Super Genius Guys” at Design Miami/

2012-12-10T18:19:00-05:00

The budding industrial designer also gave his top picks from the fair, which unsurprisingly all feature bright swaths of primary colors: a Charlotte Perriand bookshelf from Galerie Downtown accented with yellow squares; a Pierre Guariche chair from Demisch Danant, a Riteveld chair from Galerie Vivid; and a desk from Galleria Rossella Colombari by Gio Ponti, whom he was so delighted to have discovered: “He tried to make the office fun!”

MVDRV's Book Mountain

2012-10-04T11:30:00-04:00

A literal advertisement for reading: MVRDV completes Book Mountain and Library Quarter Spijkenisse.

(Spijkenisse, October 4th, 2012): Today Spijkenisse Book Mountain and the adjacent residential neighbourhood will be opened by Prinses Laurentien of the Netherlands. Manifesting itself clearly as a mountain of books on the towns market square, it is both an advertisement and an invitation for reading. Clever stacking of the buildings commercial functions produces its pyramidal form, which in turn, is wrapped in the libraries 480 meters route along bookshelves. Underneath the libraries barn shaped glass envelope the book gains a strong educational presence in this formerly agricultural community located close the docks of the Port of Rotterdam. The adjacent Library Quarter consisting of 42 social housing units, parking and public space is also a project by MVRDV, together with the Book Mountain it forms an exemplary eco-neighbourhood.

The library is designed as an advert for reading, its visible presence and invitation holding great significance for a community with 10 percent...

What is the Future of Academic Publishing? An Interview with Gita Manaktala from MIT Press

2012-07-17T12:16:00-04:00

University presses will endure as long as they are in a position to offer significant value to academic authors and their readers, and as long as they have the support of their home institutions. In the present and near future, we will see new models for the university press including funded open access models, collaborative publishing models, and global partnerships to develop and disseminate high quality scholarship worldwide.

What lies behind the battle over the New York Public Library

2012-07-09T12:25:00-04:00

The hottest cultural controversy of this already hot summer concerns the New York Public Library (NYPL), and a plan to disembowel its main building – a plan that will slice open the stacks and "replace books with people", in the words of the NYPL system's CEO, Tony Marx. It's enraged writers and professors, demoralized a staff already coping with layoffs, and called the entire purpose of the system into question.

They went their own way, to a late acclaim

2012-07-05T16:33:00-04:00

A UK friend is writing "a little book" on architectural losers. Such a British idea. He's collecting the under-talented and the under-appreciated, the beaverers-away in an unappreciated style. To which my predictable response is: how many volumes can you run to? How, from the myriad, will you choose?

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS – Limited Edition Book

2012-01-04T14:10:34-05:00

Our friends at eVolo have sent us a copy of their limited edition book, EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS, and boy, it's a festival for eyes and biceps. At 1224 pages, the book measures 9″ x 11.5″ x 2.5″ and calls for extra sturdy coffee tables.

EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS celebrates six years of the internationally acclaimed eVolo Skyscraper Competition and compiles 300 outstanding high-rise architecture projects selected from the over 4000 submissions since its inception in 2006. The contest recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the implementation of new technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations. Studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution are some of the multi-layered elements of the competition. It is an investigation on the public and private space and the role of the individual and the collective in the creation of dynamic and adaptive vertical communities.

The projects are divided into six chapte...

John Hill, celebrating New York one building at a time

2011-12-09T17:19:30-05:00

This is John Hill’s element, and these are his people. Hill has begun to emerge, in the past five years or so, as one of New York’s great architectural communicators, an exquisitely informed tour guide for the layman design enthusiast. His main platform has been his website, A Daily Dose of Architecture, which, if it does not quite stand astride the world of design blogs, nevertheless lords over a small sub-fiefdom of largely unstaffed, noncommercial sites.

Reading L.A.: The giant, complex legacy of the Case Study program

2011-09-20T19:59:15-04:00

The Case Study program, in case it still needs any introduction, was a pioneering effort sponsored by L.A.-based Arts & Architecture magazine and its ambitious editor, John Entenza, to develop new and unapologetically modernist prototypes for the postwar American house.

Bookless Library Trend: Designing Space for Digital Learning

2011-07-11T13:57:37-04:00

Scott Erdy, designer of the new library, says open, flexible space — the furniture is movable and the walls act as one giant whiteboard — allows student and staff "knowledge transfer," a concept reinforced by Danuta Nitecki, dean of Drexel's libraries. "We don't just house books, we house learning," she says.

Tower of Babel made from books

2011-05-17T12:24:20-04:00

The top may not reach unto heaven, but the Argentinian artist Marta Minujin's 25-metre tower is made of 30,000 books in languages from all over the world. Built in San Martin Square, Buenos Aires to mark the Argentinian city's naming as 2011 World Book Capital, the artist suggested that in 100 years people will say 'there was a Tower of Babel in Argentina ... and it didn't need translation because art needs no translation'

Architect as Auto Designer: Le Corbusier's Minimum Car

2011-05-13T14:38:26-04:00

“Voiture Minimum: Le Corbusier and the Automobile” ($49.95) focuses on Le Corbusier’s design for a “minimum car,” a two-seat, bare-bones people mover with a sheer, angled front. His design existed only in drawings during his lifetime, but became probably the most famous of all automobile designs contributed by architects.