Archinect - News

Chicago Architecture Center announces new location opening in August 2018

2018-06-13T18:56:00-04:00

Chicago Architecture Center (CAC), formerly known as Chicago Architecture Foundation, recently announced that it will open at its new location at 111 E Wacker Dr., a building originally designed by the office of Mies van der Rohe, on August 31, 2018. The interiors have been redesigned by local firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS + GG).

Chicago Architecture Center Lobby. Image: CAF.

Chicago Architecture Center Tour Orientation Hall and Box Office. Image: CAF.

The new Center will join the active riverfront and house everything architecture for Chicagoans and tourists alike, bringing new walking tours, imaginative education programs, and new interactive exhibits. More details on the new tours will be released later this summer.

Chicago Architecture Center Lecture Hall. Image: CAF.

Chicago Architecture Center Design Studio. Image: CAF.

The CAC will feature custom-designed spaces for tour orientation, design education, public programs, along with store and exhibit space develope...

Stock bricks to Brutalism: housing design in Poplar

2016-04-08T05:07:00-04:00

The East End of London has been associated with many things: the “cockney” sense of humour; colourful criminals; waves of immigration; and poverty. Not many people associate it with architecture. But it was in Poplar in the south eastern corner of the East End that I chose to do my architectural guided walk, called Stock Bricks to Brutalism: Housing Design History in Poplar. The reasons can be found in the great regeneration of the area’s housing that took place in the twentieth century to address the problems of overcrowding, dilapidation, poor sanitation and bomb damage.

In this one locality, Poplar, you can trace the progression of social housing design from the end of the First World War through to the early 1980s – the days of high volume council housebuilding in the UK – from blocks of flats of the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s built using “stock brick” (London’s traditional building material made from the clay on which the city stands) to 1960s and 1970s tower and slab blocks built i...

Eclectic Revisited: Preserving Venice's Architectural Context

2013-05-14T18:35:00-04:00

In Venice, Sandmeier wanted to tell the story of a whole neighborhood, not just emphasize the architectural merits of any one structure, and in doing so build a history of architects and artists working together. "Buildings are important for different reasons. Sometimes it's the architecture, sometimes it is the history, and sometimes it is the context," she explains. "Venice is a place with such rich cultural context that underlies the whole community, there is a lot to talk about."

Mimi Zeiger reports from the self-guided tour "Venice Eclectic: Modern Architecture from the '70s and '80s", part of "Curating the City Modern Architecture in L.A.," the Conservancy's ongoing contribution to Pacific Standard Time: Modern Architecture in Los Angeles.