Archinect - News

The Adrian Smith Prize for the 2017 Ragdale Ring goes to "LIVING PICTURE" by T+E+A+M

2017-03-22T19:37:00-04:00

Ragdale, the acclaimed artists’ residency in Lake Forest, announces the winning design of the fifth annual Ragdale Ring competition. Amidst a field of national and international submissions, T+E+A+M, a young, internationally recognized architectural collaborative based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was selected by jury for their proposal of LIVING PICTURE– a contemporary interpretation of the original Ragdale Ring garden theatre designed by architect Howard Van Doren Shaw in 1912.

The winning T+E+A+M exclaims, "We are thrilled to receive the Adrian Smith Prize for the 2017 Ragdale Ring. In its short history, this competition has produced an exciting series of experimental projects, and we’re honored to join the ranks of past winners. We look forward to our residency, meeting the other fellows, and watching our project come to life through public programming."

Historical elements from the original Ragdale Ring appear on lightweight objects stacked and spread throughout the grounds. Blending ...

Archinect's top picks for the London Design Festival

2016-09-10T01:07:00-04:00

London Design Festival is always a highlight of the city's cultural landscape, and this year is no exception, with a number of new events added as well as many returning exhibitions.

Here are Archinect's top picks for London Design Festival 2016:

London Design Biennale at Somerset House:

7-27 September. Open daily from 11AM. Somerset House, Strand, WC2R 1LA Tickets on sale via Ticketmaster

The heavily anticipated London Design Biennale is launching this year for its inaugural exhibition. During its three-week takeover, the Biennale will showcase installations, artworks, prototypes, and designs from over 37 different countries and territories, all exploring the Biennale's 2016 theme: "Utopia by Design".

Highlights from the Biennale include:

Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby's 14-metre, kinetic sculpture that highlights wind energy usage in the UK.

Lebanon's Annabel Karim Kassar's Beirut street scene. The work explores social interactions and use of space, through a s...

Reflections on Binational Urbanism by Ryan Dewey

2016-07-18T20:59:00-04:00

Earlier in my career I was based in Chicago but I was working in Nigeria and also doing some graduate work in the summer in England.

The longest trip I packed for was 60 days in the same suitcase and it covered a month in England and a month in Nigeria.

It was a tough time in my life, but it was also kind of utopian as well because there are certain advantages to being highly mobile.

In Germany today there are 1.8 million Turks. Every year 93.5% of those people travel from Germany to Turkey at least one time, that is nearly 1.7 million Turks across all strata of society who regularly travel between cities in Germany and cities in Turkey.

Looking at the lifestyle of this population, Bernd Upmeyer develops a theory of a new form of urbanism in his book Binational Urbanism. A binational urbanist is someone who because of the practical matters of their lives spend their time living in oscillation between two different countries. This is a thoughtful book with an interesting approach to rese...

Chipperfield's Jane Street Proposal Faces Vehement Opposition in NYC

2016-06-23T15:43:00-04:00

"Plans to raze a two-story parking garage at 11-19 Jane Street and build a... seven-story apartment building designed by ... David Chipperfield came in front of the Landmarks Preservation Commission" "Testimony against the development came in droves, with NIMBYs speaking against the project’s "inappropriate," "out-of-scale," "travesty" of a design."

New York Yimby has published Chipperfield's entire presentation.

London's Natural History Museum to create outdoor exhibition spaces

2016-06-01T03:52:00-04:00

The grounds outside London’s Grade I-listed Natural History Museum are set to become an extension of the institution’s display. Niall McLaughlin Architects and landscape designer Kim Wilkie have submitted plans to transform the museum’s outdoor area into open-air galleries, along with more public spaces. The external parts will showcase extinct plants and animals in the east and living species in the west. There will also be a restaurant, a courtyard and a separate square.

Find more museum related content here:

New public artwork gathers 10,000 tree species spanning the history of the planet

2016-05-13T11:42:00-04:00

Th University of Bristol has revealed a new public artwork to mark the opening of the University's new Life Sciences building. After three years research, over 10,00 unique tree species have been gathered from across the planet.

The sculptural pavilion is a collaboration between the artist Katie Paterson and the architects Zeller & Moye.

Katie Paterson recalls:“Some samples are incredibly rare–fossils of unfathomable age, and fantastical trees such as Cedar of Lebanon, the Phoenix Palm,and the Methuselah tree thought to be one of the oldest trees in the World at 4, 847 years of age, as well as a railroad tie taken from the Panama Canal Railway, which claimed the lives of between 5,000 to 10,000 workers over its 50 year construction and wood is salvaged from the remnants of the iconic Atlantic city boardwalk devastated by hurricane Sandy in 2012.”

The artwork will be permanently sited in the historic Royal Fort Gardens in Bristol.

...

London Design Festival has revealed a host of installations for 2016

2016-05-04T12:29:00-04:00

Installations announced for LDF 2016 include a giant curved walkway made of sustainable wood, a takeover of a disused stairwell and sit-in boxes that aim to address the housing crisis. The Smile, designed by Alison Brooks Architects, is an outdoor installation supported by the American Hardwood Export Council and ARUP, and is a 36m-long curved rectangular tube made from sustainable timber.

Here are some more of this years offerings:

Baboushka Boxes are design by dRMM and supported by financial company Legal & General as well as the homeless charity Shelter.

Created by consultancy Gilthero and supported by Italian watch maker Panerai, The Green Room will be based in a stairwell at the V&A and explores the concept of time.

The much discussed crazy gold course conceived by Sir Paul Smith which still needs to raise £120,000 through Kickstarter to happen.

Already announced the live robotically sculpted canopy at the V&A.

For related installations, check these out:

MONU #25 is seeking submissions for "Independent Urbanism"

2016-05-02T14:32:00-04:00

Although the idea that the nation-state as the exclusive agent of connections and relations between political communities is increasingly considered obsolete, the world has witnessed the emergence of more than 30 new countries over the last 3 decades. Especially the fundamental changes in world politics that unfolded across Europe at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s - most emblematically symbolized by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, that led to the dissolution of the USSR and Yugoslavia - caused the creation of most of the newly independent states. Fifteen countries, such as Armenia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, or Uzbekistan, to name just a few, became independent with the implosion of the USSR in 1991. Similarly, the former Yugoslavia dissolved into the independent countries of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Serbia and Montenegro, which in turn changed into the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, and finally i...

The architecture of burglary is increasingly virtual

2016-03-31T18:29:00-04:00

Buildings and burglars are intertwined in the mind of Mr. Manaugh, whose nonfiction book arrives Tuesday from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fascinated by bandits who smash through walls, crawl up air ducts and tunnel through floors, the author wanted to explore their singular approach to architecture as a force to be abused, outsmarted and escaped.

In an era of cybercrime, do burglars miss the architectural beauty of the traditional brick and mortar break-in? Well, yeah, according to author Geoff Manaugh. In an era where break-ins are more about clearing digital walls and hacking into people's identities than using diamond-tipped drills to penetrate hidden vaults, the bad old-fashioned vocation of physical burglary is the latest casualty of digital disruption. Ironically, many of the contemporary light-fingered must now worry about carpal-tunnel syndrome.

For more on the intersection of crime and architecture:

Pentagon Replica Built in Shanghai

2016-01-08T12:45:00-05:00

Earlier this week, drone footage capturing a shanzhai Pentagon in suburban Shanghai went viral. The knock-off replica building, which is shaped just like the real headquarters of the US Military in Washington DC, is a massive a shopping center in Nanxiang Town out in Shanghai's Jiading District.

The Birth and Death of Privacy: 3000 Years of History Told Through 46 Images

2015-12-14T11:35:00-05:00

“Privacy may actually be an anomaly” ~ Vinton Cerf, Co-creator of the military’s early Internet prototype and Google executive.

Privacy, as we understand it, is only about 150 years old.
Humans do have an instinctual desire for privacy. However, for 3,000 years, cultures have nearly always prioritized convenience and wealth over privacy.
Section II will show how cutting edge health technology will force people to choose between an early, costly death and a world without any semblance of privacy. Given historical trends, the most likely outcome is that we will forgo privacy and return to our traditional, transparent existence.

Internal Walls (c. 1500 AD): Most homes didn't have walls separating the rooms until the development of the brick chimney, which needed support beams.

Source: Housing Culture: Traditional Architecture In An English Landscape (p. 78).

“A profound change in the very blueprint of the living space” ~ historian Sarti Raffaella, on the introduction of the chimney.

Read on t...

ARCHTOBER Design Festival for NYC Kicks Off Today, August 1, at 12 noon

2014-08-01T13:27:00-04:00

"Archtober is a collaborative initiative of the AIA New York Chapter, the Center for Architecture, and over fifty other organizations focused on the built environment," says Cynthia Kracauer, AIA New York managing director. "The flagship program is the Building of the Day, one for each of the thirty-one days of October."

Today the AIA New York is hosting a "Summer Live Tweet" event at 12:00 noon at the Public Theater in New York City's Astor Place to launch Archtober, the monthlong, citywide design festival.

The host, AIA New York, has offered free ice cream from Coolhaus for anyone who tweets the event.

The reason the event is at The Public Theater is that it's the first announced "Building of the Day" for Archtober, set for a ticketed tour on October 1, the festival's first day.

About Archtober:
For anyone who loves architecture and design, New York in October offers crisp, pretty fall days -- and the biggest citywide design festival in the United States. The fourth annual Archtober Architecture and Design Month, led by the AIA New York and with 40-plus participating organizations, will take over the city.

Today's official kickoff for Archtober 2014 is called the Summer Live Tweet, and it takes place from 12-1:00pm, with FREE ice cream sandwiches by Brooklyn's architecturally inspired dessert-maker, Co...

New call for submissions MONU #21 - INTERIOR URBANISM

2014-04-30T15:17:00-04:00

This new issue of MONU aims to investigate interiors, and especially public interior spaces, on an urban scale and their meaning for cities as social, political, economical, ecological, open and accessible spaces, whether publicly or privately owned. (Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, April 2014)

When a few years ago we at MONU made the huge mistake of travelling in August to Tokyo, the warmest month of the year in this part of the humid subtropical climate-zone, we were constantly forced to find shelter in the public air-conditioned interiors of the city. But what we experienced there had, due to the dimensions and quality of the spaces, very little to do with the interconnected public interior spaces of bad repute of the past, and neither was their quality entirely based on the incredibly sophisticated public toilets featuring amenities such as bidet washing, seat warming, and deodorization; nor had it to do solely with the functional additions of experiences such as theatres, libraries, and other attractions. Rather, their value was based on a multiplicity and complexity of features, spaces, and aspects that interacted, creating public spaces of a quality that can usually only be found outdoors or in connection with the outdoors. That is why these public interior spaces s...

Test Project

2013-02-22T13:09:00-05:00

Lofts are known for their chic industrial flair, and mostly contemporary finishes. For this Prague based loft, A1 Architects kept things simple and clean with the continuation of the already there shell.

The Rounded Loft was a great space to create a continuing staircase and chain-link style separation between the upper and lower levels. Smooth and softened corners create a less hard environment that really speaks volumes about the barely there textiles and finishes of the residence. Hard woods, natural stone and concrete are the main palette with a very sleek set of built ins and clean lined stairs.

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2013-01-23T12:27:00-05:00

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Testing Testing

2013-01-22T12:25:00-05:00

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test 1/21

2013-01-21T12:29:00-05:00

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A cool project

2013-01-20T12:27:00-05:00

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test 1/19

2013-01-19T12:31:00-05:00

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SpaceInvading Testing

2013-01-18T12:29:00-05:00

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test 1/17

2013-01-17T12:32:00-05:00

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A Project Test

2013-01-16T12:31:00-05:00

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test 1/15

2013-01-15T12:44:00-05:00

Test Test

2013-01-14T12:34:00-05:00

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2013-01-13T12:48:00-05:00

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test project 1/11

2013-01-11T13:11:00-05:00

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