Archinect - News

As Milan's San Siro stadium goes, so goes the city

2022-05-23T14:56:00-04:00

AC Milan’s Serie A championship title over the weekend brought out the missives on placemaking and memory concerning the club’s future in the 96-year-old stadium adored by the Milanese as their seconda casa.

The facilities, last upgraded in 1990 and renovated throughout the 2000s by the local firm Ragazzi and Partners, are set to be replaced by a new “cathedral” designed by American sport heavyweight Populous for the year 2027. Many feel it is the last victim of a changed European Soccer landscape dominated by Russian oligarchs and other monied interests from abroad after the late-1990s to early-2000s.

Previously on Archinect: Populous tapped to lead design of new combined Inter & AC Milan stadium

Alternatives, including its reuse as a massive Covid memorial, have been proposed by the faithful, who also claim a demolition effort of such size would be harmful to the environment. A final approval is still on the horizon for later this year. The architects of the new stadium say their...

Hagy Belzberg provides a personal touch with new Holocaust Museum LA expansion

2021-10-28T12:33:00-04:00

After exceeding its own ambitious annual attendance goals to the tune of over 50,000 visitors, Los Angeles’ Holocaust Museum is set to expand on its existing 28,000-square-foot facility with a new extension plan from its original designer Hagy Belzberg.

Located in Pan Pacific Park at the edge of the city’s Fairfax neighborhood, the expanded museum hopes to eventually host around 500,000 visitors annually and greatly enhance the educational mission to which its founding traces.

Belzberg’s updated plan features a new rooftop pavilion atop the existing building that is meant to house a boxcar taken from the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. A new building will be introduced that includes space for a 200-seat theater, expanded gallery spaces, and a new educational center for the museum, which was founded by Holocaust survivors in 1961. An expansion of an interactive installation from the USC Shoah Foundation will provide a link for future generations of visitors.

The museum's exp...

A 1950's replica town in San Diego aids patients with memory therapy

2018-09-17T14:12:00-04:00

On August 13, a brand-new town in Southern California welcomed its first residents [...] on a light-industrial stretch of Main Street in Chula Vista, a San Diego suburb. Then they emerged in Town Square®—a 9,000-square-foot working replica of a 1950s downtown, built and operated by the George G. Glenner Alzheimer’s Family Centers. Unlike the businesses around it hawking restaurant supplies and tires, Town Square trades in an intangible good: memories.

The new 50's replica town in San Diego is the largest US investment in reminiscence therapy for dementia and age-related cognitive impaired patients. The industrial warehouse has been transformed into a fake town of 14 storefronts complete with a diner, a movie theater, a pet store, a park-like square, and a city hall. Patients are aided in therapy by props from the years between 1953 and 1961. Several other locations are forthcoming, the next planned for a former Rite Aid in Baltimore.

From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration

2016-08-18T02:09:00-04:00

Last year, the group released a report documenting more than 4,000 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. After that report, Mr. Stevenson launched a project to collect soil from unmarked lynching sites around the country. The soil will be placed in glass jars that will be on display at the museum.

Campbell Robertson highlights plans by the Equal Justice Initiative, to build a national memorial to victims of lynching and open a museum that explores African American history from enslavement to mass incarceration.

h/t @Rob Holmes

Poland to remove Soviet-era memorials

2016-04-05T12:34:00-04:00

The Polish government plans to demolish about 500 Soviet monuments throughout the country, head of the Institute of National Remembrance Lukasz Kaminsky said in an interview with online portal Onet.pl, the RBC news website reported Thursday. Kaminsky — whose institute is responsible for investigating crimes against the Polish nation — said that plans for the demolition of the monuments, would be sent to local authorities in the coming weeks.

According to the report, the monuments will be relocated to museums where they can serve as a "witness of hard times."

Many Soviet war memorial have been vandalized and demolished in Poland, whose population views the Soviet role in the Second World War "with ambiguity or outright hostility."

Russians have reacted strongly to these moves in Poland. In their view, the Red Army liberated Poland from the Nazis.

For related coverage:

"Architecture is a field of repression": Daniel Libeskind on childhood memories, trauma, and architecture

2015-11-19T17:05:00-05:00

"You repress almost everything to produce a building," states Daniel Libeskind during a long and wide-ranging conversation with the architectural historian Gillian Darley in the context of the exhibition Childhood ReCollections: Memory in Design at the Roca London Gallery.

"Everything is repressed because it has to fit into the context, it has to be stylized, it has to appeal to clients, it has to be normal," he contends. "But I always thought, try to show what has been repressed in architecture. It’s very difficult because people don’t like it."

Their conversation touches on a number of Libeskind's central concerns and makes frequent reference to both his biography and his oeuvre. Here are some of the highlights (check out the full video below):

On his childhood:

"I was lucky to have that experience of... the mythology of New York, which is arriving by boat as an immigrant. You know, woken up, 4 o’clock in the morning by my mother with my sister, go up, wake up, 'you’re going to see Ne...

How do humans perceive the built environment in outer space?

2014-07-10T14:43:00-04:00

I put out a call via twitter and facebook for quick drawings of the ISS from memory. Asking my social media friends for sketches wasn't some kind of contest about accuracy or skill, it was more an investigation into what sorts of visual responses come up when people think about the space station. The (totally unscientific) results reveal much about how we see and understand the built environment in outer space.

Polish Museum Repairs a Tie to a Jewish Past

2013-04-22T14:54:00-04:00

Among civic leaders here there is a strong sense that Poland will never fully recover from its 20th-century traumas until it recognizes its Jewish past, and the museum is seen as a major step. “Jewish memory is becoming part of Polish memory,” the chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich

Recently at the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Poland’s chief rabbi unveiled an unusual sculpture. Nicholas Kulish, later interviewed Rabbi Schudrich about the meaning and importance of the museum's existence. Reflecting on the building (designed by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki), Mr. Kulish writes it is "a shining symbol of Warsaw’s transformation from a dark and cheerless post-Communist city to a thriving Central European capital".

The Architecture of Memory

2012-08-07T14:23:17-04:00

Most of us think of memory as a chamber of the mind, and assume that our capacity to remember is only as good as our brain. But according to some architectural theorists, our memories are products of our body’s experience of physical space. Or, to consolidate the theorem: Our memories are only as good as our buildings.