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A group of German architects and planners has started a campaign to rebuild the Wolf House, widely seen as a link between van der Rohe’s early, more conventional designs and his later buildings, like the Barcelona Pavilion and the Farnsworth House, that would redefine modern architecture. [...]
But the plan has run into resistance from other architects and scholars who say that the Wolf House would be too hard to reconstruct [...].
— nytimes.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Two of a kind: photographer Robin Hill contemplates the Farnsworth House and Glass House simultaneouslyRedesign of DC's main Mies library tip-toes around the good and the badDavid Chipperfield pledges to carefully "optimize" Mies van der Rohe's Neue... View full entry
On March 18, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens an annex at Madison Avenue and 75th Street in Manhattan, it will be attempting to shrug off the ghost of a museum past.
The specter is the Whitney Museum of American Art, which called the iconic Marcel Breuer building on that corner home for nearly five decades. In an eight-year deal, the Met is leasing the Breuer building from the Whitney— which relocated to its dazzling new Renzo Piano–designed home last year...
— Architectural Record
The Breuer-designed building will house some of the Met's modern and contemporary collection. But shrugging off the association between the Brutalist masterpiece and its former tenant may prove a tough task. For many, nothing say's "the Whitney" more than those protruding windows... For related... View full entry
The hotel plan by the Procaccianti Group Inc. [...] is being welcomed by construction-trades unions, city officials and surrounding business owners. But Ned Connors, an architect and historian of the Weybosset urban renewal project, says he will miss the Fogarty building.
It’s not ugly, he said, it’s just … different. At about 50 years old, he said the Fogarty building is in the most dangerous time in a structure's life: when it’s too old to be hip but too young to be venerated.
— providencejournal.com
Sadly the architectural design of the proposed extended stay high-rise hotel that has been OKed by Providence City Council last December to replace the Fogarty building could not be any more generic and bland. What do you think, Archinectors? Do we have Providence locals here among our readers... View full entry
Brutalism lost the good fight in 2015. [...]
Demolition on another building by Johansen began late last year as well: Stage Theater, once known as the Mummers Theater, in Oklahoma City. The Oklahoman‘s Steve Lackmeyer called the 1970 project the number-one modernist building in the city that should have been spared. [....] Preservationists had hoped to turn it into a children’s museum. Models of the building show what a delightful museum it might have made [...].
— citylab.com
Brutalike stories in the Archinect news:Orange County legislators fail to save Paul Rudolph's Government CenterArt college professor suggests makeover for brutalist Boston City HallBrutalism: the great architectural polarizerNew movement urges to call Brutalism 'Heroic' instead View full entry
Most recently, Archinectors had the chance to win a copy of African Modernism. Published by Park Books, the book is a visual investigation of post-colonial nation building in Ghana, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. The book's editor, architect Manuel Herz, also took a moment with... View full entry
The company promised to “faithfully reproduce” several beloved artifacts in the lobby, including wall tapestries, paper lanterns and sliding doors, the lacquered furnishings and map of time zones...But those plans have done little to assuage the concerns of preservationists, many of whom contend that Tokyo is destroying its greatest postwar architectural assets to accommodate the 2020 Olympics and a recent surge in tourism. — The New York Times
The New York Times profiles the historic Hotel Okura Tokyo, which began reconstruction last September, much to the dismay of preservationists worldwide. The Times covers its modernist legacy and the pressures of the real estate and tourist market that Tokyo can't avoid.Previous news about the... View full entry
Several African countries gained hard-fought independence from their colonizers during the 1950s and 1960s, and one way the countries expressed their new national identities was through architecture. The book African Modernism delves into this relationship between architecture and the... View full entry
‘El mejor anuncio de la historia’, or ‘the best ad in history’ is a picture taken in February 2008, which neatly encapsulates several aspects of the city’s urban landscape: the formal, the informal and the promotional.
'[...]Around and in between the super bloques a carpet of slums has grown, an organism that now seems to bind the blocks together in some symbiotic relationship. These are the kind of hybrid forms that are developing in Latin American cities [...]’
— failedarchitecture.com
Related in the Archinect news:Venezuelan Government Evicts Residents From World's Tallest SlumWithout Housing Reform, is a "Tower of David" Coming to Your City?Housing mobility vs. America's growing slum problem View full entry
For those former guests and architectural buffs who lamented the demolition of the iconic Hotel Okura Tokyo, they can soon preserve a piece of it in their homes.
Hotel officials plan to sell on the Internet some of the furniture and fixtures used in the guest rooms and restaurants during the main building's 53-year history, with the proceeds going to charity. [...]
The 11-story main building, which opened in May 1962 [...], was called “a masterpiece of Japan’s modernism architecture.”
— ajw.asahi.com
Previously:It's lights out at the old Okura: reconstruction of the iconic Tokyo hotel starts next weekAs the Okura says sayonara, Tokyo doesn't seem to care muchFarewell to the Old Okura View full entry
Hippie modernism focused not on rigorous form but rather on a kind of socially inspired bricolage. Hippie modernism has been not only misunderstood but also underestimated. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of a ‘design science revolution’ inspired the hippie bricoleurs to shoulder their generation’s emerging notion of environmental stewardship. — PLACES JOURNAL
Greg Castillo pens a great article about one of the most overlooked and often dismissed role of hippies in what we have today greedily claimed by the millenials and known as "environmental movement."“Hippie Modernism” is published in coordination with the Walker Art Center... View full entry
“Let us usher in a great golden age of construction,” exhorts one of the 310 official patriotic slogans published this year. The ambition is already evident in the number of cranes that dot the skyline [...]. The most prominent structures are the 47-storey shafts of the Changjon Street apartments, an 18-tower complex completed last year in less than 12 months and nicknamed “Pyonghattan” by foreign diplomats. But other emerging skyscrapers go undiscussed and unphotographed [...]. — theguardian.com
Related stories on Archinect and our sister site Bustler:“Crow’s Eye View”, from the 2014 Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion, returns as a NY exhibition (Bustler)North Korean architect of new Pyongyang airport reportedly executed by Kim Jong UnNorth Koreans hesitate to move into Kim Jong Un's... View full entry
When the 70th regular session of the General Assembly convenes on Sept. 15, it will do so in a complex of buildings that hasn’t looked so good or felt so secure in generations.
“We now have a very safe compound,” said Michael Adlerstein, [...] executive director of a seven-year, $2.15 billion renovation, known as the capital master plan, that is nearing completion. More visible than anything else is the robust yet crystalline new glass facade of the 39-story Secretariat building.
— nytimes.com
Tokyo’s venerable Hotel Okura is getting a remake, starting next week.
Over the course of the past 53 years since its opening on May 20, 1962, the Okura, located in Toranomon, has earned an unsurpassed reputation both at home and abroad as a luxury hotel to represent Japan.
The hotel said in a statement that it will maintain the Japanese traditional aesthetics and the basics of the architecture style of Hotel Okura.
— japantoday.com
Previously on Archinect: As the Okura says sayonara, Tokyo doesn't seem to care muchFarewell to the Old Okura And before the wrecking ball ends an era of Japanese 1960s Modernism to make way for the new, shiny, 41-story, $836M Okura Hotel, here a few more impressions of all its glory on the... View full entry
In the mid-1960s, the De Gaulle-instigated Mission Racine to develop Languedoc-Roussillon’s tourist economy created six modernist seaside resorts from scratch, each a day’s boat ride apart – still one of the largest state-run development schemes ever.
...there was some ideological overlap between the purifying doctrines of naturism and modernism: Le Corbusier himself enjoyed airing his bits on the Cote d’Azur and shared the same teacher as Cap d’Agde’s chief architect, Jean le Couteur.
— the Guardian
'His signature style helped bring Palm Springs to the international stage and his body of work is still as fresh today as when first created...' — The Desert Sun
Aptly nicknamed a "man of steel", Desert Modern-style architect Donald Wexler was known for his affordable sleek steel homes and was one of the principal figures who influenced Palm Springs' iconic modernist aesthetic that has increased in popularity in the last 15 years or so, attracting... View full entry