Open letter to Giuliano Pisapia, Mayor of Milan, from the international community of arts & culture... Dear Mayor Pisapia, It is with regret and disappointment that we learn that Stefano Boeri was dismissed from his position as Councillor for Design, Fashion and Culture for the city of... View full entry
The wizards at Electronic Arts seem to understand cities as market-driven algorithms. Input people, rules, and resources, and the results are stability, growth, and wealth...SimCity’s engineers have repeated the same mistake made by countless potentates, forgetting that cities are forged both by master builders and the people who hack their grand plans. — NY Magazine
When Electronic Arts released the newest version of SimCity Justin Davidson decided to take the plunge and explore what the game could teach about urban planning and running a city. The effort helped him to identify three guiding principles for creating a successful SimCity ; 1) Money... View full entry
I had my first architecture exhibition early this year in Macau, China and it was the greatest experience I have ever had... The exhibition was divided into 2 halls; the primary hall included all my Graduate school work in Washington University in St. Louis - concept sketches, technical drawings, renderings and physical models. The secondary hall contained concept sketches and all my traveling / study abroad experiences in Barcelona, Spain, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Argentina and a lot more! — archinect.com
During the winter there has been a selection process to choose the architects who will be invited to participate in the planned architectural competition to design a Nobel Center at Blasieholmen in Stockholm. In total, over 140 architects have been considered by a specially appointed evaluation committee. Of these, 12 have been selected to be invited to the architectural competition. — nobelprize.org
The Nobel Foundation has announced the following 12 architects selected: Kim Herforth Nielsen – 3XN, Denmark Bjarke Ingels – BIG, Denmark David Chipperfield – David Chipperfield Architects, England/Germany Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron and Ascan Mergenthaler – Herzog & de Meuron... View full entry
In a speech prepared for the AJ Women in Architecture lunch, Scott Brown called on her role in Robert Venturi’s 1991 win to be acknowledged retrospectively. Describing it as a ‘very sad’ situation, she said: ‘They owe me not a Pritzker Prize but a Pritzker inclusion ceremony. Let’s salute the notion of joint creativity.’ — architectsjournal.co.uk
These landmarks are not as grand as the Chrysler Building in New York, and there is no Art Deco district like Miami Beach’s, but fans say there is an unusual wealth and diversity of stock, much of which has remained standing — if poorly maintained — through 50 years of Communist rule. — NYT
Some 250 Cuban and foreign connoisseurs met last week in Havana for the start of the World Congress on Art Deco which runs until March 27th. Victoria Burnett interviewed a number of the organizers and participants and spoke to them about challenges facing the owners of Art Deco... View full entry
Today, the Freelancers Union is one of the nation’s fastest-growing labor organizations, with more than 200,000 members, over half of them in New York State. Ms. Horowitz, who has never lacked audacity, says she expects to expand the organization to one million members within three years. For some perspective, the United Automobile Workers union currently has 380,000 members. — New York Times
Perhaps, architect interns, and those contract workers, will look to adding their numbers to this collective, instead of waiting for venal institutions - you know who you are - to make substantive changes to the way that things work. View full entry
Hotello is a portable space, packed into a trunk. Hotello contains all the necessary elements needed to work and rest. It consists of a metal structure that supports a translucent and sound absorbant curtain. Hotello can be combined and aggregated in different configurations. — conceptualdevices.com
The Washington Post Co. has hired the architecture firm Gensler to plan and design the company’s future workplace as it considers selling its downtown headquarters and relocating.
Based in San Francisco, Gensler is one of the largest global architecture firms and has done extensive work in Washington for law firms, universities and think tanks. Spokespersons for the Post and Gensler confirmed the partnership.
— washingtonpost.com
Cool Spaces! is a primetime television series that will profile the most provocative architecture of the 21st century. Hosted by architect Stephen Chung, each hour show focuses on public spaces across the US and Canada, conceived by daring architects who push the boundaries of contemporary architectural design, materials and process. Produced for Public Television, Cool Spaces! offers viewers an experience of these public spaces as never before. — coolspaces.tv
Stephen Chung, architect and host of the tv show, tells Archinect, "We are trying to show non-architects that architecture is a pretty cool subject- and if they just give us a chance and take a look- they might agree." View full entry
The April 3, 1988, magazine's cover illustration showed bubble-shaped cars traveling in "electro lanes" on a double-decked, high-rise-lined 1st Street in downtown's Civic Center area. The cover's headline was "L.A. 2013: Techno-Comforts and Urban Stresses — Fast Forward to One Day in the Life of a Future Family." — latimes.com
To read the 1988 Los Angeles Times Magazine's future prediction, DOCUMENT: 1988 'L.A. 2013' essay, click here. View full entry
The Ping’an Finance Center is planned to top out at 660m, making it not only China’s tallest building but the second-tallest building in the world after the Burj Dubai. 80m has been built so far, but construction has been halted in the wake of the revelation from Shenzhen’s Housing and Construction Bureau that substandard sea sand concrete had been used in its construction. — wired.com
Peter Reyner Banham spent his time in Buffalo engaged in a scholarly project on the imaginary of American industrial architecture that took the form of historical research, hands-on engagement and seminar instruction, resulting in his landmark work, A Concrete Atlantis. In celebration of... View full entry
Providence, Rhode Island was recently selected as America's most innovative city at the nationwide Mayors Challenge, taking home the $5M-Grand Prize for its idea "Providence Talks." The Mayors Challenge, hosted by Bloomberg Philanthropies, is a competition to inspire American cities to generate innovative ideas that solve major challenges and improve city life - and that ultimately can be shared with cities across the nation. — bustler.net
Architecture’s favorite black humorist Rem Koolhaas is at it again, off planning a Venice Biennale that stresses the dangers of globalization while battling conservationists for rights to transform a 16th-century Venetian palazzo — which currently serves as a post office — into a retail hotspot. Koolhaas’s firm OMA and its client Benetton recently secured permission to redesign the palazzo into a department store/cultural venue after five years of facing resistance from preservationists. — blogs.artinfo.com
