What they wanted to do was a building which you could prefabricate. It wouldn't weigh much, it would be quick, distinctly hi-tech...Nick Grimshaw in particular became a kind of brand ambassador for Britain. — BBC News Magazine
Hugh Pearman, reviews the new RIBA exhibit The Brits Who Built The Modern World, 1950-2012. The exhibit which celebrates the work of Sir Michael Hopkins, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Lord (Norman) Foster, Lady Patricia Hopkins, Lord (Richard) Rogers and Sir Terry Farrell, opened February 13th and... View full entry
The third edition of The Deans List: featured Jack Davis of Virginia Tech.Topics ranged from Virginia Tech’s founding in a pedagogy of "experimental laboratories", the International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA), a Center in the School of Architecture + Design which brings together... View full entry
Call them members of the permanent intern underclass: educated members of the millennial generation who are locked out of the traditional career ladder and are having to settle for two, three and sometimes more internships after graduating college, all with no end in sight. — The New York Times
David Boyle did not build his house out of shipping containers to be hip, though he does live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He left the water pipes exposed not in pursuit of an industrial chic aesthetic, but to make them easier to fix. [...]
Their goal, he said, was not style, but a place immune to the neighborhood’s rising rents, built out of materials cheap enough that it could inspire other urban homesteaders to do the same.
— nytimes.com
In a new exhibition, Michael Pawlyn lays out his vision for architecture inspired by the natural world – including biorock buildings grown entirely underwater and whole office blocks being lit by learning from the blind sea star. [...]
“All my work is driven by a frustration with the word ‘sustainable’,” he says. “It suggests something that is just about good enough, but we need to be looking at truly restorative solutions.
— theguardian.com
Form per our fragmented cultures can follow the function of materials proved to work through our fragmented physics and building sciences. We rely highly on statistics in building sciences. In interpreting culture and evolution of culture, we have little to no consensus. — toskovic.com
I attempt to create a roster for building design of construction under plural sciences, plural cultures with the mission of completeness of expression from and to person, building, town, metropolis, the national arena, and larger hubs of human connection. View full entry
For a Modernist house designed and built by his firm Tonic Design + Tonic ConstructionFebruary 17, 2014 (Raleigh, NC) -- Vincent Petrarca, an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Architecture at North Carolina State University’s College of Design and a founding partner of... View full entry
His work is badly constructed, ravey-balls hair metal, a C.C. DeVille guitar solo that cannot—will not—end until the billionaire clients who keep paying for this shit can be stopped. — gizmodo.com
I guess this is what you get when you put a decent writer in charge of driving traffic.CPM = 1 / Journalism = 0 View full entry
Last night on the bucolic hilltop campus of Occidental College, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke with the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, about the state of L.A. urbanism. This broad topical platform positioned Hawthorne's interview not as a political... View full entry
It was mocked and misunderstood. But it produced some of the most sublime, awe-inspiring buildings on the planet. Jonathan Meades, maker of a new TV series about brutalism, gives his A-Z — theguardian.com
The latest addition to the Los Angeles skyline — the New Wilshire Grand, the tallest structure to be built west of the Mississippi — takes a major step forward Saturday when more than 2,000 truckloads of concrete are driven through downtown for what is being billed as the world's largest continuous concrete pour.
The slurry-fest begins at 5 p.m. and is expected to last nearly 20 hours.
— latimes.com
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. — Places Journal
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... View full entry
Inspired by the engineering, intricate choreography, and impromptu interactions of your daily commute? Wish there was an open mic night for historians and urbanists? A show-and-tell for your creative musings on mass transit? Looking for a public platform to present your ideas to a captive audience?
Us, too. That’s why we are excited to announce PLATFORM, a new series of cross-disciplinary programs created by the public for the public. Have an idea? We’ll give you a platform.
— NY Transit Museum
The New York Transit Museum is launching an open exhibition program, accepting proposals for projects devoted to any and all aspects of public transportation. The aptly named Platform program will exhibit the first winning proposal in its subway station home in downtown Brooklyn, on Thursday... View full entry
Communities can transform underused areas of L.A.’s largest public asset—our 7,500 miles of city streets—into active, vibrant, and accessible public space with People St, a program of the City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT). Eligible Community Partners can apply for approval to create projects that enhance the quality of life in this city. Three innovative types of projects are available: Plazas, Parklets, and Bicycle Corrals. — People St.
Los Angeles began piloting its "People St." program in 2011, developing spaces designed to reclaim sections of streetspace for public recreation and use, rather than car traffic. The projects were few but popular, including the Sunset Triangle (designed by Rios Clementi Hale Studios) plaza in... View full entry
Many of the world’s displaced live in conditions striking for their wretchedness, but what is startling about Kilis is how little it resembles the refugee camp of our imagination. It is orderly, incongruously so. Residents scan a card with their fingerprints for entry [...]. Inside, it’s stark: 2,053 identical containers spread out in neat rows. No tents. None of the smells — rotting garbage, raw sewage — usually associated with human crush and lack of infrastructure. — nytimes.com