Archinect - News

"A Night in Paris"

2017-04-23T21:58:00-04:00

Protests in Paris in the aftermath of the vote have turned violent with smoke grenades, flares and glass bottles thrown at police. More rallies, dubbed the “night of the barricades,” are expected to take place in 13 cities across France.

Live event cameras covering the night of French elections. The footage follows night time streets and other public spaces romancing the dreamy city with shadowy elevations, silhouettes and the sounds of the Parisian architecture and urbanism. Considering the French tradition of protest, this is certain to get bigger as the second round of elections approaching in May. Let's hope nobody gets hurt.

Editor's Picks #408

2015-03-16T11:50:00-04:00

Nicholas Korody profiled the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). jla-x was excited as has "been looking for a way to get involved with something like this".

News

- The world lost visionary Frei Otto and his death moved up the announcement of his winning the 2015 Pritzker Prize. Plus, the renowned Michael Graves died and his firm promised to "continue to honor Michael’s humanistic design philosophy".

While EKE thought Otto was "a spectacular choice. Bravo.", Eric Chavkin noted "Frei Otto's work inspired Glen Small's BIOMORPHIC BIOSPHERE and much of early SCI_Arc student work". RJ Magoon also opined "No matter your opinion on the man or his work, it's hard to deny Graves' enormous influence on the practice and education in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century".

Ayesha Ghosh reported in from the first of the Architectural League of New York 2015 Emerging Voices lecture series, with firms Aranda\Lasch and MANUEL CERVANTES CESPEDES / CC ARQUITECTOS. There Aranda claimed "we like th...

Is Istanbul heading for renewed protests over Gezi Park?

2015-01-14T14:19:00-05:00

Now the barracks plan has been revived. [...] Will one of central Istanbul’s few remaining green spaces become a symbol of consumerist might and the weakness of people power? Activists have pledged to take to the streets should the plan go forward. “If this project really comes to pass despite the high level of objection from the public, that will create a second wave of uprisings, and this time it will be more influential,” said Eyup Muhcu, the head of Turkey’s main architects’ union.

Previously

An urbanist's guide to Istanbul: ‘We live in a giant construction site’

2014-07-21T13:08:00-04:00

Istanbul is the city of transformation and contradiction. As an urbanist, I am trying to keep record and make sense of this transformation and am especially interested in its winners and losers. At the moment we live in a giant construction site, where skyscrapers, mega projects and urban renewal projects are taking place all around. There is a gold rush to real-estate development.

Gezi Park: Architecture and the Aestheticization of Politics

2014-02-14T13:39:00-05:00

Our task — and we should well speak as architects — must be making the invisible visible, uncovering and retracing the concealed limits of the city. We must construct barriers and counter-spaces within and against the processes that tame and dissolve the crucial loci of democracy.

Within a few years, rapidly growing Istanbul will overtake London and Moscow as Europe’s largest metropolis. Not coincidentally, Turkey is undergoing a profound shift toward privatization, as seen in the government's plan to redevelop Taksim Gezi Park into a shopping mall with a nostalgic Ottoman facade. On Places, architect Pedro Levi Bismarck examines the plan as a reflection of a larger democratic crisis, following Siegfried Kracauer’s observation: “Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself.”

Editor's Picks #326

2013-07-30T10:54:00-04:00

In her recently published Op-Ed Ann Lui, reflected on the experience of receiving a jury citation, for her and her partner’s entry in the 2013 Burnham Prize Competition: NEXT STOP-Designing Chicago BRT Stations.

She concluded "So submit the competition that doesn’t have a properly sized curb — and in fact doesn’t have a curb at all. This is a defense for the projects that have balloons, trees on skyscrapers, and blimp docking stations. It is also a defense for every detail a designer developed and then translated into reality".

Donna Sink was moved "Beautiful. I love this so much. It's ultimately an optimistic profession, even with knowing how little we know (and I say this after 28 years in the discipline - still learning)".

News
New York-based Turkish architect Selim Vural, founder of architecture and interior design firm Studio Vural, shared his design for a Gezi Park Monument, with Archinect. The memorial commemorates the recent protests on Istanbul's Taksim Square.

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Gezi Park Monument by Studio Vural

2013-07-22T18:56:00-04:00

New York-based Turkish architect Selim Vural, founder of architecture and interior design firm Studio Vural, has shared with us his design for a Gezi Park Monument. The memorial commemorates the recent protests on Istanbul's Taksim Square against the planned construction of a shopping mall in place of the historic Gezi Park — which sparked the nationwide 2013 protests in Turkey (previously on Archinect).

Project Description from Selim Vural:

Beyond commemorating important events, monuments come to being through significant ideas. Their bodies are usually aesthetic, dynamic, communicative and distinctive yet beyond all, they are clear embodiments of their generative ideas.

It is also significant that all monuments of liberty in history are made of or derived from female figures. There is a soft power, an illuminated fearlessness in their stance, which is not evident in the singularly powerful male figures. On the one hand they are complex, conflicting, and plural and on th...

Taksim Square and Gezi Park Protests: Designing a Common Present, Future, and Past

2013-06-17T20:22:00-04:00

I call these projects urbicide because of the social and ecological damages they cause, such as land speculation, expulsion of the lower-middle classes from the urban center, and the zoning of green areas for development. Among the projects is a third bridge over the Bosphorus, a canal bisecting Istanbul in the north-south axis near its western border, and the redevelopment of Taksim Square.

Solidarity with Istanbul

2013-05-31T11:14:00-04:00

Last few days Istanbul has been the site of mass protests and battles raging for the Gezi Park (translating as stroll park) in Taksim District where the prime minister Erdogan's government wants to build a "Shopping Mall," a kitschy copy of a 19th. century building, Taksim Military Barracks, that was demolished in 1940 on the recommendations of French architect Henri Prost who is known for his work with Tony Garnier.

The morphing of the existing park with grown trees to enclosed courtyard style kitsch shopping mall.

The decision to demolish the park is really a most recent assault in accordance with the over commercialization of this historic city of 16 million people. The blunt action to send bulldozers to uproot the trees certainly hit a nerve with thousands of protesters who are fed up with government's draconian measures of late, threatening the basic liberties of Turkish society at large and the invasion of the publicness of the open spaces in Turkey's largest c...