Amelia interviewed Jason Pomeroy an architect, academic and urban planner based in Singapore, about his new travel show City Time Traveller.

His travels through Asia have convinced him "What transcends culture though is an indigenous civilisation’s understanding of basic environmental and social needs, embodied in many of these historical buildings. Shelter from the elements, natural light, natural ventilation, locally sourced materials and a spatial ‘encoding’ as to who can come in and occupy a particular space, and who must stay outside, can be found in all".

Plus, the seventh edition of Screen/Print featured Bauhaus-University Weimar, Horizonte's Ausgabe 08. Specifically an essay authored by Tyler Survant’s titled 'Biological Borderlands: Ant Farm’s Zoopolitics'.

News

The NYT published a trend-piece of sorts, about the new permanent, intern underclass. 

In response Miles Jaffe argued the "Sad thing about this article is they're pushing the idea that this an acceptable lifestyle choice. Gotta love the faux-liberal corporate mouthpiece NYT". In a later comment Donatello D'Anconia pointed out "The AIA is proposing The National Design Services Act...The proposal seems to ask the government to provide financial assistance to designers volunteering in their local community. So outside of IDP, interns can now look forward to filling their weekends with more unpaid design service...The only thing the AIA could do to alleviate the situation is put pressure on NCARB to do something about the IDP system".

curtkram responded "donatello...i have nothing against reforming IDP.  i would strongly support any system that creates better architects...the real problem with internships, as i see it, is that employers are not providing their junior staff experiences that they need to be exposed to, and they aren't paying living wages to their younger staff".

The AIA reported a Slight Rebound (January ABI score was 50.4, up from a mark of 48.5 in December) for the Architecture Billings Index, with business conditions most favorable in the South and West Regions.

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, penned a review of Johnston Marklee & Associates’ new building on the campus of the Menil Collection.

He concluded "once you take a closer look, it becomes clear that the architecture is not so much spare as it is efficiently layered with ideas and comfortable with contradiction...The design is a sustained negotiation between public and private spaces. It is dedicated to display and to keeping objects protected or hidden from view".

Bustler.Net announced Mecanoo and Martinez + Johnson as the winning team for the renovation of the Washington DC’s historic Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Peyton Westlake loved "both the design plan's inventive respect to Mies and the artistic renderings themselves (breaks the Monotony of the 'realistic' computer renderings of the day)".
 

Firms/Blogs/Work Updates

Last week saw the launch of the Los Angeles Biennale in Shenzhen an experimentation in creating a nomadic biennale on urbanism, hosted by the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture. Archinect became the digital repository for the event, blog posts included; photos of the arrival by Petrunia, Sarah Lorenzen’s offer of A plausible reference and Aris Janigan’s De-Tribalizer in Shenzhen.

Oppenheim Architecture + Design is hiring an Archivist. The hire will be responsible for Identifying, preserving, and making the company’s records accessible for future use.

LLB Architects are  thrilled to be working with Bryant University on a new learning facility for their expanded Physician Assistant program.

After an approximately five month absence Alec Perkins breaks his silence to let it be known he has "received a contract for full-time employment from an architecture firm in Stuttgart, Germany, with a start date of April 1st".
 

School/Blogs

If you are in Troy New York, this Wed, Feb 26 2014,  Professor Catherine Ingraham will be presenting a lecture - Plasticity: Architecture and New Natures.

Kyle Miller (Assistant Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University) shared images from the opening of the Possible Mediums exhibition, which took place at the Taubman College Liberty Gallery in Ann Arbor, Michigan on January 17th, 2014.

Boston Architectural College shared some data on the success of its graduates in today's job markets. At graduation, 85% of BAC 2012- 2013 graduates were employed at the time of program completion - 80% of undergraduates and 90% of Masters.

For those looking to get a in non - traditional job academia, LSU’s Coastal Sustainability Studio (CSS) is looking a Project Manager who will be responsible for project management and community outreach.

Discussions

Menona started a thread back on Febuary 10th to discuss the MLK Library Proposals. At the time Menona wrote "It looks like they plan to take a genuine thing, gut it, and then turn it into an ersatz pastiche imitation ... of itself?" curtkram opined "wow, those mecanoo drawings are awful.  is that what architectural representation looked like before talented people got into the field?  there isn't any information in them….it's just not a good space.  and with all the shitty entourage and wine glasses in the library, you might think they would stick a book in there?".

However, Donna Sink had a different problem "Mies was a master of managing transparency and opacity.  Turning the mass into transparency is an enormous change in a Mies design.  Then patterning the glass to look like marble is an affront to Modernism".

won and don williams argued "If you look closely at the Mecanoo renderings and can get past the cheeky rendering style, there is really very little there that could be considered contrary to a Miesian design aesthetic; it's all orthogonal/geometric glass, steel, stone, and wood, structurally and materially honest".

Peace77 had a question re: ADA doors. Namely, "If there are multiple doors --into-- a room, do all of them need to be ADA compliant?" Janosh suggested looking in "IBC Chapter 11" for an answer, while Josh Mings wrote "I would make them ADA compliant, especially if occupancy calls for two exits".

Finally, gruen sought advice on acting as architect of record. He explained "My main problem is that my ‘client’ is an architect hired after the design arch was done w SD and DD. the client wants to do CD with my review, which is not enough for me".

Non Sequitur noted "our office had a similar project come up last month...We declined the project instantly" but mightyaa had some experience with this kind of work "With my corporate stuff, I was wedged firmly in-between the corporate design team (another national architecture firm)...Dull it is.  Paste and clip.  Illegal?  Not really.  It's basically a lego set of prefabricated pieces of specific stuff that's usually identical...It's not 'proud work'.... Just lucrative so you can take on something fun".

TedTedTed agreed "We have done lots of work like this over the years, generally for retailers...These projects are actually pretty helpful in regards to income to the firm; not a lot of time investment ...I can't think of a time where we have had an issue with it from our E&O insurance carrier".

Additionally

In Happy Fifty Years, Gentrification!... Does Gentrification Gentrify without Gentrifiers?, Javier Arbona examines the inherent critical charge of the word gentrification as well as the history of attempts to divorce it from its "initial charges of spatial colonization and class segregation".