Archinect’s most recent ShowCase feature highlights VLP Chapel in Grand-Bigard, by tcct, a firm based in Bruges, Belgium.

News

Portuguese collective DOSE sent us images and a fascinating time-lapse video of their project BLUETUBE BAR, a temporary bar to operate at the annual academic festival in Oporto, Portugal, Queima das Fitas.

Wallpaper brought together five young firms of note at the V&A+RIBA Architecture Gallery in London and asked them to reveal how they got started. Apurimac reacting to the images of one of the firms ACME’s porposal for Universidad Distrital, in Bogotá commented "Those poor bricks in that Columbia project... Its like they "asked the brick what it wanted to be" and it said ‘raped’."

Snøhetta has released a virtual tour exploring their proposed expansion/redesign for SFMOMA. SUVERK noted that he spends a lot of time walking through that hood and argues that "the new Snohetta design is very stealthy - kind of a you don't know it's there until it's in your face. The surrounding towers St. Regis(SOM) and the W Hotel(Hornberger and Worstell) dominate the skyline to the point that one would not right away notice the SFMOMA expansion- (which is the same size as Botta's).- It will sneak up on you and then you will be curious -WTF is that? Not unlike Libeskinds- Jewish Contemporary Museum a block away on Mission street".

Schools/School Blogs
Parsons The New School for Design has announced a new Master of Science in Strategic Design and Management, which will launch in fall 2012. Fore more info click here

Henry Cheung, at Woodbury University was a part of A.I.R. Studio (Civic Conduits + Contested Terrain) co-taught byJennifer Bonner + John Southern this semester. The studio site was Owens Lake and his project Machinic Veils "is a machinic laboratory that assimilates into the naturally-artificial landscape of Owens Lake".

farid rakun, has completed his bench/pvc storage device and Jacob Kenney at Drexel University reviewed the end of his first term of architecture school.

Jeremy Aranoff, is using his blog to record his research process while writing a thesis at the Technion (Haifa) on exchange from Carleton University (Ottawa). His most recent post titled "In building a design school for the state of Israel (The Jewish State), is there a necessity in having a design relationship with the culture of Judaism?" generated a discussion regarding the relationship between the architecture of the Occupation and the meaning of "Jewish architecture". In response to some posts from applet, Jeremy asked "Are you suggesting that the two most important elements in a design school for the state of Israel would be to situate the building at the site of the occupation wall, and in making a clear identification of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis?"

Work Updates/Firm Updates/Blogs
Paul Petrunia suggests buying an InFocus calendar for the holidays.

Check out Berliner Kunstturm, a project completed during a traveling topic studio in the fall of 2010 in Munich Germany by Scott Kepford.

Brian Henry, assured us he is still alive, just busy, working on a small design-build project. The project "takes a carriage house, over a hundred years old, and converts it into a music studio for a local musician".

While David Rowan Johnson recently worked on some ...Bent Ply Eye wear and fischerrandom shared a small project he did, which will be displayed at Storefront as part of their exhibition on Strategies for Public Occupation.

Discussion Threads
jimi!! wonders if Parametricism is really the new unified style of the future a la  Patrik Schumacher? archinet answered no "i think you need to dig way deeper then to just assault formalism that uses the computer. what exactly do you mean by ‘the rise of digital technologies’?" while Steven Ward argues "parametric tools will be absorbed into the flow of how architects produce their work, not as a style but as a means of completing work. currently these tools are more prevalent in schools than in the offices of practitioners".

TheCollector asked What do you think of the idea of a government architect? FRaC suggested with tongue in cheek perhaps, "why not have government architects do everything?  it would eliminate all that bureaucracy of the private sector architects going through that messy permit process and would greatly streamline the building process.  we could put people back to work building the nation's infrastructure and a chicken would be in every pot." Plus, toasteroven pointed out we do have architects who are employed by central and local government  "but often their primary role are things like facility management, programming, and planning - and with facilities management, the 'design' is often restricted to more utilitarian structures.”

As part of the annuallly Archinect required discussion on James Kunstler, Miles Jaffe posted a video of Kunstler discussing the tragedy of suburbia. Urbanist thinks "He has a point, but his medicine is worse than the disease... a Stepford nation of neo-traditionalist throw-back villages..." EKE contends that many architects could use some introspection "Many architects, including most on this board, are HARD CORE modernists and have no openness to traditional work of any kind, nor do they have any patience with people who try to explain why traditional design has value.  Hence the inevitable adjectives such as ‘Stepford-like’, ‘Disneyland-esque’, ‘historical pastiche’. Yet the public finds beauty and value in traditional architecture and urbanism.  Instead of denigrating the laypersons who ask for traditional architecture as uninformed, foolish, or misguidedly nostalgic, I think the profession would be well served by asking themselves:  What is it about the work that we have produced that isn't connecting with the people that buy it and use it?...How can we provide an architecture that appeals to people beyond the architectural avant-garde?" Citizen agreed noting "I'd have to echo EKE's comment on the "typical Americans" broad brush. Such open disdain is one reason our profession gets its own negative stereotype of elitism and snobbery."

The conversation moved on to a discussion about the difference between style and substance ie: can you have well designed street-scape and urban fabric that doesn’t rely on New Urbanist/historical styles of architecture but instead makes use of contemporary (stylistically) architecture but still features the desired 'sense of place' and 'successful urban form' ? Contribute to the discussion here

Finally, piero1910 wants to hear your opinions on what buildings are the most iconic buildings of post-modernism. So far Miles Jaffe, has posted some images which included Michael Graves' Portland Building and adobeisnotsoftware wrote "Stirling's Staatsgalerie is among them.  It kind of made any later buildings unnecessary".

Additionally
Think about participating in #whOWNSpace’s latest instance of tactical urbanism in which they attempt to occupy the NYC Department of Buildings' inbox! The goal is to use the very rules governing POPS to highlight code violations and thus get the NYC Department of Buildings to enforce the zoning code.