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Slums, Siza and squatting: ICYMI Weekly News Round-Up for July 21, 2014

2014-07-28T14:45:00-04:00

In Case You Missed It, a look back at the major happenings from last week's News.

Friday, July 25

Families Removed From 'Tower of David' Skyscraper Slum: Venezuelans initially began living in the abandoned office towers in 2007, due to the country's burgeoning financial crisis. They are now being evicted by Caracas city officials, citing safety concerns in the 45-floor building.
Row over Olympic cauldron design settled out of court: Olympic officials settled with designers from Atopia, who claimed the cauldron design relied heavily on their ideas without citation. While Atopia's influence has been recognized, design of the cauldron is still credited to Thomas Heatherwick.

Thursday, July 24

Álvaro Siza donates his architectural archives to institutions in Portugal and Canada: The archive will be divided up between the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal), the Fundação Gulbenkian in Lisbon and the Fundação de Serralves in Porto.
Can a Frank Gehry design help change the dynamic of Wat...

The architecture of London 2012 official Olympic sponsorship

2012-08-14T19:31:00-04:00

Give Coca-Cola points for architectural originality. It has built what looks like a series of red and white plastic blocks that have just been hit with buckshot and are exploding into shards. What is this thing? It is the Coca-Cola Beat Box, a “building that you can play,” as the company’s many young docents will exuberantly explain.

David Segal took readers on a tour of the corporate sponsorship pavilions at London's Olympic Park. Mr. Segal found corporate self-promotion run amok. Along with a range of architectural follies.

London 2012 BMW Pavilion by Serie Architects

2012-08-13T17:16:00-04:00

With the London 2012 Olympic Games still fondly in our memories, here is another architectural attraction you may have missed while watching the recent sporting events: the London 2012 BMW Group Pavilion designed by Serie Architects.

It is a euphemistic urbanism and overlay

2012-07-11T21:14:00-04:00

In view of recent events, I have found myself asking whether it is a good thing to make a piece of city where rioting is impossible. The Olympic Park, even in legacy mode, seems to be built for this purpose.

Kieran Long revisits Olympic Park a year later and looks ahead to it's “legacy”. Long finds that all the "regeneration" and "overlay" while positivist and successful in providing amenities is more a "carpet of statistical generalisations and demographic assessments" and clarifies something about how the British (ed. and I might suggest society at large in the 21st century attempts) to make cities.

Zaha calls London Olympics organizers "rude"

2012-05-21T13:33:00-04:00

The architect who created the £269 million aquatics centre has criticised “rude” Games bosses for not inviting her to a single event. Zaha Hadid claimed she was not asked to the opening or closing ceremonies of the Games, or to any of the diving and swimming heats at her acclaimed building in the Olympic Park.

Welcome to lockdown London

2012-03-13T23:41:00-04:00

More visibly, this shift means that the familiar security architecture of airports and international borders – checkpoints, scanners, ID cars, cordons, security zones – start to materialise in the hearts of cities. What this amounts to, in practice, is an effort to roll out the well-established architecture and surveillance of the airport to parts of the wider, open city.

Amidst news of the austere, lean venues and reviews of the architectural highlights constructed, Stephen Graham professor of cities and society at Newcastle University and author of Cities Under Siege, reminds us that London 2012 will see the UK's biggest mobilisation of military and security forces since the second world war. The overall security costs are now projected to exceed £1bn and there is talk of deploying Ground Based Air Defence Systems.

H/T Demilit

More than just a field of also-rans

2012-03-06T16:53:00-05:00

The Basketball Arena, by architects Wilkinson Eyre, is one of two venues that can be taken apart into kit form and transported. This one, which seats 12,000, consists of a tent-like membrane stretched over a random arrangement of curved forms. The chief of the 2016 Rio Olympics has expressed an interest in taking it to Brazil

From a octopus-tentacle shooting range to a multicoloured rubber bridge, Steve Rose looks at the hidden architectural highlights of London 2012 Olympics. While three major venues have dominated public and media attention; the main Olympic Stadium, the Aquatics Centre, and the Velodrome, Rose focuses on the broader legacy. From sewage, water and transportation infrastructure, to power substations and temporary venues "here are some of the highlights so far".

Thought and quality: London's (2012) Olympic Village

2012-01-10T20:36:00-05:00

Reviving the Maida Vale model is often talked about but rarely done, and although the athletes' village version hasn't quite captured the lushness and generosity of the originals, it is at least there. It is also welcome that there is a degree of calm to the buildings, compared to the frenzied gesticulations, the visual shouts of "buy me, buy me" that typify most works of regeneration.

Rowan Moore visits the 2012 Olympic Village in London. The now athlete and later, mix of affordable and for profit, mass housing estate, is a massive go at post-Olympic regeneration. The village features design and planning work by the likes of Fletcher Priest, Arup and West 8 and he acknowledges that in a former job he helped select them. However, despite the strengths and weaknesses of the project, what is most disappointing to Moore is the fact the precedent it sets comes as the result of the huge energy associated with the Olympic Games and not just standard operating procedure.

London's Olympic venues challenge architects

2011-11-29T00:10:56-05:00

In London's case the practicality of the architecture is a reaction to the economic rather than the political excesses of the recent past. The 2012 Games are shaping up, in fact, as one of the clearest signs yet that the architectural boom years of the last decade or so in the West have definitively ended.

Architecture student's design selected for £5 Olympic coin

2011-11-13T22:13:20-05:00

Saiman Miah, studying for his Masters degree at Birmingham School of Architecture designed the Olympic coin which features architectural elements of London's skyline and pictograms of athletes around the edge to create a clock face inspired by Big Ben.

Innovative 'Meccano' construction

2011-06-14T13:25:00-04:00

It is not too hard, then, to imagine a future Olympics held in temporary and reusable buildings. Not only would this save cities from debt, redundant venues and white elephant awards, it would also mean that the Games could be held in those with precious little money to throw away. A low-cost travelling Olympics could tour the world, taking in cities that might gain greatly from the event but could never begin to think of the equivalent of Zaha Hadid's Aquatics Centre at Stratford.

Jonathan Glancey reviews the innovative 'Meccano' construction of the Olympic basketball arena designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects and the KSS design group. He discusses how it could democratise the Games since the 12,000-seat basketball arena can be deconstructed after the 2012 Olympics, with much of it reused. Previously A Template for the Future.

Template for future

2011-06-09T08:42:13-04:00

Dennis Hone, chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), said building a temporary indoor venue of its size was unprecedented and could form the basis of an International Olympic Committee plan to bring down the cost of hosting the Games. "It makes a lot of sense, especially if you want to take the Games beyond the richest cities in the world. To do that, you've got to bring the costs down," he said.

The £42m 12,000-seat basketball arena at the Olympic site in east London, is designed to be deconstructed after the Games and its seats sold off to other event organisers.

So it begins, London 2012.

2009-10-29T15:35:01-04:00

As the countdown to the 2012 Olympic Games in London begins the Guardian publishes an exclusive snap-shot and accompanying interviews to update us on the progress. Guardian