The infrastructure council, which was still being formed, would have advised Trump on his plan to spend as much as $1 trillion upgrading roads, bridges and other public works. Its cancellation follows Trump’s announcement Wednesday that he was disbanding two other business advisory panels. — Bloomberg
After multiple CEO's began quitting both the American Manufacturing Council and the Strategic and Policy Forum in protest of Trump's response to Charlottesville, the 45th President has decided to not move forward with the Council on Infrastructure, still in the process of being formed. The council... View full entry
This week we're joined by Inga Saffron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. If you haven't read her latest piece on Henry Wilcots, the relatively unknown architect responsible for finishing Louis Kahn's masterpiece in Dhaka, go read it now. We talk with... View full entry
“You can argue that any sculpture is art in some way, but it’s a loose argument,” Schoonmaker said Tuesday. “I don’t know that these statues are worthy of preservation as art objects so much as historical objects – made to preserve a lost cause, a lost war. They weren’t made with great artistic intent, but with political intent. And intent matters in this case.” — The New Observer
With the tragic events occurring in Charlottesville, much ink has been spilled over the topic of Confederate memorials: Should we keep them? Should we take them down? Is keeping them up a celebration of slavery and is taking them down erasing an important part of our past that we must face? With... View full entry
Anthony Morey introduced Cross-Talk #2: Pedagoy. ryanbacha complained "the architectural academies of old generated inside their walls self-referential pedagogies. God forbid the layman being able to understand anything you said in this article." Responding to the criticism Anthony Morey... View full entry
Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architecture firm behind the ambitious Tate Modern extension, took a reduced fee for work on the building project after costs went £45m over budget.
According to documents obtained by the Architect’s Journal under the Freedom of Information act, Herzog & de Meuron was asked not to take its full fee for extra work on the 10-storey building, which went from costing £215m in 2012 to £260m in 2015.
— theartnewspaper.com
The Art Newspaper cites the minutes from a 2015 Tate board of trustees meeting: "Conversation at a senior level indicates that [Herzog & de Meuron] will look sympathetically on this position, but that costs have already been incurred to a certain level, which will require some recompense... View full entry
The historic Japanese city of Kumamoto, famous for its picturesque 15th century castle, experienced a damaging earthquake in 2016, leading to the demolition of several of its historic buildings. The World Monument Fund has pledged to help restore the remaining older buildings (although it should... View full entry
No disciples of Le Corbusier, Harvey Corbett, Robert Moses or Norman Bel Geddes have been to Velotopia. That means there are no highways and no racks of car-parking stations. Neither have any disciples of Ebenezer Howard been there to suggest that development be clustered around satellite towns with train connections back to the core. — The Guardian
Steven Fleming (previously featured in our Working Out of the Box series), founder of the Dutch bike-centric planning consultancy Cycle Space, recently published a new book that lays out an utopian city built around bicycles as the main form of transportation. In Velotopia people enjoy their... View full entry
If you draw by hand and want that authentic, angular all-caps architectural lettered look for the text on your drawings, this straightforward video breaks down how to create all 26 letters of the alphabet. Get ready to learn about "dynamic angles" and suggested connections: View full entry
Tesla revealed today that it created what it calls the ‘Tesla Tiny House’ to feature its energy products, like solar panels and Powerwall.
The company is bringing the house on tour using a Model X “to educate the public on how to generate, store and use renewable energy for their home.”
The tiny house contains a Tesla mobile design studio and configurator to help home owners configure a solar plus energy storage system for their home.
— electrek.co
Needless to add that the Tesla Tiny House itself gains all its electricity via a solar installation on the tiny roof. The exhibition tour is limited to four major Australian cities for now, but the economic gain could be far from tiny — as the world's leader in capita penetration of rooftop... View full entry
A Syrian boy hand-built a model of what his hometown might look like after the country’s civil war, and now “Future Aleppo” is on display in Los Angeles. [...]
As he watched his city get demolished, Mohammed carefully crafted his vision for a future Aleppo using paper, wood, colored pencils, and glue. He lovingly recreated destroyed landmarks, like the medieval Citadel and his favorite park, and added imaginary, forward-looking buildings and design features [...].
— KCRW Design & Architecture
"While much of his model was destroyed when Mohammed and his family fled to Turkey, the surviving portion was brought to the U.S. by Alex Kalman, founder of Mmuseumm, a pop-up gallery in Manhattan." KCRW's Design & Architecture host, Frances Anderton, talks to Kalman about the model's... View full entry
While UN satellite analysis suggests about 10,000 buildings have been severely damaged or completely destroyed, the real level of destruction is believed to be higher.
Taking into account damage to multiple floors of buildings, not seen via satellites, the UN now estimates the real number of damaged buildings to be more than three times greater - about 32,000.
— BBC News
Lucy Rodgers, Nassos Stylianou & Daniel Dunford provide an in depth examination of the architectural/urban impacts (what to speak of the personal, loss of lives etc.) of the, nine months long, battle for Mosul. View full entry
In 2016, 42 percent of new AXP participants and 30 percent of new ARE candidates identified as non-white—up three percentage points for both groups. However, diversity among newly licensed architects and NCARB Certificate holders remained the same. For comparison, 38 percent of the U.S. population identifies as either non-white or Hispanic, according to 2015 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. — NCARB
There are now more women and non-white participants in architecture as of 2016 according to the NCARB, which has just released its 2017 "By the Numbers" report. As NCARB notes in a press release: “While several groups remain underrepresented within the profession, these trends point to growing... View full entry
Eyal Weizman is a London-based Israeli architect and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work focuses on architecture as a form of political intervention and the discipline's role in modern urban warfare. For the past couple of years, Weizman's... View full entry
Instead of the usual snap of people lounging in the sun in Bryant Park, visual effects artist Rod Bogart has created a Voronoi diagram of the outing and posted it to his Twitter account. When asked how he had placed the center points of the diagram, Bogart tweeted that "I used Illustrator to drop... View full entry
A major Roman settlement discovered south of Lyon in France is the “most exceptional excavation of a Roman site in 40 or 50 years”, says the chief archaeologist working on the project. Benjamin Clément, who works for the Swiss conservation company Archeodunum, is leading a team of 15 archaeologists at the dig in Saint Colombe, a small town near the city of Vienne. — The Art Newspaper
The well-preserved ancient Roman neighborhood, dubbed "Little Pompeii" by the archaeologists, covers an area of almost 7,000 square meters (75,000 square feet) and was discovered during construction of a housing complex near the city of Vienne. View full entry
