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News Benjamin Paulker interviewed Frank Gehry for Foreign Policy regarding his first project in the Arab World. sameolddoctor was amused "It is funny that Gehry thinks of himself as a humanitarian" but pvbeeber wondered "Not sure why everyone is giving him such a hard time. ... View full entry
Now that the exhibition has opened at the museum's Geffen Contemporary branch in Little Tokyo, where it will limp along through the middle of September as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents series, it's clear that it is the product of an architectural ruling class in Los Angeles that is not so much dysfunctional as increasingly insular. — Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times
It might seem like a mismatch: the Dolans, veterans of many public brawls, against Kimmelman, an urbane trained pianist who previously wrote primarily about art. But such is the power of the Times when it’s given to a crusading voice. — NY Magazine
Renderings by Tappan Zee Constructors LLC, the team selected to design and build the bridge at a cost of $4 billion, show a structure crowned by 400-foot-high towers that look like insect antennae waving aimlessly in the wind.
Four pairs of masts tilt outward, from which cables splay to support the road deck. The towers are intended to form an iconic image, but they are just stumpy.
This is a site that deserves the magnificence of the Golden Gate Bridge.
— bloomberg.com
Henry Hope Reed, an architecture critic and historian whose ardent opposition to modernism was purveyed in books, walking tours of New York City and a host of curmudgeonly barbs directed at advocates of the austere, the functional and unornamented in public buildings and spaces, died Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97. — nytimes.com
As it was Manhattan in New York nearly a century ago, China turns into a new stage in world architecture. The facts and figures behind Asian urban growth compared to Europe are incredible: it is five times faster, what took 100 years to happen in Europe has taken place here in just 20; it is also... View full entry
The shrinkage of daily newspapers and news and culture magazines has thinned the already slim ranks of architecture critics. While blogs and social media proliferate debate about architecture and design, many have fretted about the lack of a common dialogue around architecture and urbanism as defined by the work of leading critics. It turns out that architecture criticism is far from dead, however, as three established voices are finding new outlets with newspapers and national magazines. — archpaper.com
Mark Lamster has been appointed architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News. Inga Saffron has begun writing a monthly column on urbanism for the website of the newly re-launched New Republic. Michael Sorkin is slated to begin writing for the left-leaning Nation magazine. View full entry
Analysis, rather than the promotion of starchitects, was her aim, and a prodigious amount of research underlies her early, punchy pronouncements as well as her late, magisterial style...Her death removes a passionate and particular voice from the shrinking ranks of full-time architecture critics, but also represents a loss of institutional memory for architecture culture...She didn’t offer compromise positions — The Nation
In the May 6th edition of magazine Alexandra Lange authored a paean, in which she explores the legacy of Ada Louise Huxtable. Ms. Lange identifies how Ada Louise Huxtable's life and career make the case for architecture criticism "as an essential beat for a metropolitan newspaper" as well as for... View full entry
Kennicott’s entry included several pieces published in the Style section last year. One was a review in June of an exhibit of creations by the architect Kevin Roche at the National Building Museum. — washingtonpost.com
Assessing Roche’s work, Kennicott wrote, “In the end, Roche’s reputation will rise or fall depending on what becomes of the corporate world he served. If the end of corporate America is a dystopian hell of environmental catastrophe, vast economic inequity and social instability... View full entry
Archinect was excited to announce a competition we're co-hosting with Designer Pages and the LA Film Festival. This competition seeks proposals for the interior design/layout of the VIP Director's Lounge for this year's LA Film Festival. The winner will have their design executed, with a cash... View full entry
It is a thoroughly cynical piece of work, a building that uses a frenzy of architectural forms to endorse the idea that architecture, in the end, is mere decoration. Mayne's design appears to put innovative architecture on a literal pedestal — or a plinth, to be exact — while actually allowing it to become peripheral, noticeably separate from the heart of the museum and its galleries. — latimes.com
Whatever you want, then, go to an architect for it; not to a carpenter, or a mason, or your own still more profound incompetence. Tell him all your practical, material desires, and insist that they shall be respected... Settle your practical desires and state them clearly; and, if you will, pour out your vague aesthetic wishes; try to explain those crude artistic preferences, those misty, formless visions which you are pleased to call “my own ideas.” — Places Journal
Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, though little known today, was not only a leading architecture critic of her day but also one of the pioneers of the field in the late 19th century. On Places, Alexandra Lange analyzes her writings and her influence. As she writes, "Mariana Van Rensselaer worked... View full entry
How can we let geriatrics design the future? There is a creeping conservatism in old age, Rogers and Piano’s Pompidou was genuinely revolutionary, but that was in 1977, ever since then they've been riffing off the same ideas, with decreasing vitality...They are past retirement age and yet they march on, pulling out the same ideas over and over again, while the planet fawns obsequiously at their feet. — Vice
As part of Vice Future Week, Eddie Blake pens a critique of the current geriatric state of architecture. He believes that we must move beyond the tired designs of the past and embrace a new emerging architecture. The future of architecture is more co-operative, varied, often temporary and... View full entry
Ada Louise Huxtable, the dean of American architecture critics, died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. She was 91. — online.wsj.com
The €150m satellite of Paris's Louvre museum shimmers like an apparition on the raised plane of the former coalmine, looking down over streets of pitch-roofed miners' houses, dotted with the occasional chip shop. The building is formed from a series of long, low-slung walls that fade in and out of view as the changing light dances over its surface – or as clouds of drizzle engulf it entirely in the wintry gloom. — guardian.co.uk