The International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled on 17 August, that an Islamic extremist caused €2.7m in damages when he destroyed shrines in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012. This is the first time that the ICC has made a ruling solely on cultural destruction, setting an important precedent. [...]
Islamic extremists used pickaxes and bulldozers to destroy nine mausoleums and the centuries-old door of the Sidi Yahya mosque, built during a golden age of Islam [...].
— theartnewspaper.com
By ruling that "the destruction of the protected buildings has caused the suffering of people throughout Mali and the international community," the International Criminal Court in The Hague acknowledged the demolition of cultural heritage as a war crime — potentially treating recent acts of... View full entry
OMA’s first scientific building—laboratory and engineering school, Lab City CentraleSupélec in Paris Saclay, has been completed and will open to students this September. The university, which is now one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles specialized in engineering, was formed... View full entry
Famed architect Frank Gehry agreed earlier this summer to design the Krens museum, the fifth such project they've worked on together ... Krens, who is credited with conceiving of Mass MoCA before leaving to serve as the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation until 2008, first proposed a model railroad and contemporary architecture museum at Western Gateway Heritage State Park in 2015. — The Berkshire Eagle
The museum will be one piece of an 11-part revitalization plan issued by Krens for the North Adams neighborhood in Massachusetts, best known as the home to MASS MoCA—a project Gehry and Krens previously partnered on. The wide-scale development includes renovation of a historic theatre, the... View full entry
Take a walk through BIG's controversial 2,800 m2 Bunker Museum that opened this summer in Denmark— View full entry
Amazon says the new fulfillment center will create some 2,000 jobs “with benefits and opportunities to engage with Amazon Robotics in a highly technological workplace.
The company will spend $177 million to build the new fulfillment center, and job listings will start appearing six to 10 weeks before the facility opens.
— Gizmodo
Amazon says workers at their new 855,000 square feet warehouse in North Randall, Ohio, “will pick, pack and ship smaller customer items such as electronics, toys and books.” In other words, the new employees will be filling Amazon-branded boxes with the exact same sorts of goods that were... View full entry
In this round-up of notable architecture in Africa, Wired takes a closer look at projects from Morocco to South Africa, including the Lideta Mercato in Ethiopia by Xavier Vilalta and the Bosjes Chapel by Steyn Studio. As the piece notes, "Contemporary African architecture is extremely varied: it... View full entry
With an expected completion date of March 2019, the 18-story, 80-meter-tall-plus building in Brumunddal, Norway known as the Mjøsa Tower will soon become the world's tallest wooden structure, a coveted title among those designers who favor wood over more traditional tall building materials... View full entry
Archinect's Architecture School Lecture Guide for Fall 2017 Ready or not, the start of the new school year is coming up. Back for Fall 2017 is Archinect's Get Lectured, an ongoing series where we feature a school's lecture series—and their snazzy posters—for the current term. Check back... View full entry
Months later than usual, the US State Department Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs has finally announced that the exhibit for the 2018 Venice Biennial will be put together by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. Titled “Dimensions of Citizenship”... View full entry
But what if there were a way to see gentrification long before the coffee shops, condos and Whole Foods appear? What if city planners and neighborhoods had an early warning system that could sniff out the changes just as they begin?
[...] neighborhood advocates would have the opportunity to implement policies ranging from reserving affordable housing units to educating residents of their renting rights to helping small businesses negotiate long-term lease extensions.
— NPR
In his NPR piece, astrophysics professor Adam Frank explains how various big data sets, like housing prices, eviction records, census data, or social media usage, can be utilized for "predictive analytics" to detect early onsets of gentrification for specific neighborhoods at an increasingly high... View full entry
Detached from the rest of the building for soundproofing reasons, the 10,000 panels that line the central auditorium are the result of parametric design, a process of creating multiple individual designs using algorithms.
A million individual cells ranging from four to 16cm long are cut out from the panels [...]
The ivory coloured gypsum fiber acoustic panels contain a seashell motif and were designed by Swiss architect Herzog & De Meuron with help from German studio One to One.
— Global Construction Review
Interior view of the central concert hall. Photo: Iwan Baan."It would be insane to do this by hand," GCR quotes Benjamin Koren, founder of One to One, the studio that created the design algorithm for the concert hall's acoustic panels. "That’s the power of parametric design. I hit play, and it... View full entry
Houston calls itself “the city with no limits” to convey the promise of boundless opportunity. But it also is the largest U.S. city to have no zoning laws, part of a hands-off approach to urban planning that may have contributed to catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Harvey and left thousands of residents in harm’s way. — The Washington Post
Hurricane Harvey is drawing renewed scrutiny to Houston's 'Wild West' approach to planning and its unusual system for managing floodwater that, according to environmentalists, greatly diminishes land's natural ability to absorb water. While local officials have defended the city's take on... View full entry
Back in 2013, Munich-based firm Hierl Architekten won a competition to transform a historic Brauhaus into a new headquarters for the German beer company, Paulaner. The popular brewer had been originally using the site as their brewery but decided to move production to the outskirts of the city... View full entry
Milan-based Peter Pichler Architecture's “Looping Towers” was the winning proposal for a new 35,000m² residential tower complex in the Dutch town of Maarssen in Utrecht. Located on a main axis between Amsterdam and Utrecht, the complex must serve as a “social... View full entry
Over the past decade of South Korea's rapid urbanization high-density apartment development has become the most popular type of housing in the country, producing a myriad of identical, close-set, utilitarian blocks. When in 2012 the Hyundai Development Company invited UNStudio to design an... View full entry
