Harvard GSD Introduces the Wheelwright Prize
$100,000 Annual Award Open to Architects Worldwide — wheelwrightprize.org

He has split his time between London and the French capital for the past decade but next year will open a new office in the central London architecture hotspot of Clerkenwell where his neighbours will include Zaha Hadid Architects and Wilkinson Eyre.

Before he goes, Matthews has agreed to complete all his work on the Shard including the viewing gallery, due to open in February, and the restaurants on floors 31, 32 and 33 which are expected to open in the spring. — bdonline.co.uk

Even the smallest architectural design proposes to make an intervention in the known world, it dares to change things as they are, and to venture how they might be. It envisions a possible future, sometimes a fantastic one, and then sets out to make it manifest. If that’s not a rich subject for children’s books, I don’t know what is. But such books should also make us question what we want architecture and architects to be. Not just in fairy tales, but in real life. — Places Journal

There are few professionals more hopeful for a bright future this holiday season than architects, who are finally starting to see business conditions improve.

Billings at architecture firms have been depressed for the past four years, another victim of the real-estate and housing downturn. But in recent months, that has started to change. — online.wsj.com

What does it take to build a livable home for under $100 per square foot?

For a group of architecture students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, that question was answered in a semester-long project that ended last week.

The project culminated with two students winning top honors among their classmates by having their projects selected for construction by Habitat for Humanity. — nj.com

In a year that saw severe funding cuts to schools, libraries and arts buildings and the delivery of new housing rattling along at its lowest level since records began in the Twenties, there weren’t too many rays of light for British architecture. And yet one, at least, shone brightly. — telegraph.co.uk

“Pruitt-Igoe has lived on symbolically as an icon of failure. Liberals perceive it as exemplifying the government's appalling treatment of the poor. Architectural critics cite it as proof of the failure of high-rise public housing for families with children. One critic even asserted that its destruction signaled the end of the modern style of architecture.” — Alexander von Hoffman, Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard Univ.

For the latest in the Student Works series Archinect featured The Petropolis of Tomorrow: Drift & Drive...a proposed solution for Petrobras...to relocate workers offshore...Thayer-D was curious "What kind of job do students who do this kind of work expect to do?" and amphibious agreed "For me, the real problem with this project is its weakness in experimentation, substance, and form. What is radical here really?"

The winning projects of the New Concordia Island Contest have been unveiled this past weekend. The international ideas competition aims to rethink the disaster of the wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia as exceptional opportunity to imagine the future of the wreck and that of the Italian island of Giglio which has become the ship's new, permanent destination. — bustler.net

"... If history has taught us that the realization of a utopia is necessarily its destruction, Can we regard this process as a continuously failing attempt of architectural hallucinations? Or is it a way to promote escapism from an inevitable dystopic reality? ..." — www.zawia.co

Balance. For decades we’ve had an art culture that tries to wow us with too muchness — blockbusters, biennials, bank-breaking museum buildings no one needs — and that ends up delivering way too little. Could it be that the day of just enough is upon us, and that Yale’s just right museum is a bellwether? — NYT

Colquhoun (1921-2012) was credited with inspiring a generation of architects who he taught at the Architectural Association between 1957 and 64.

He studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and AA before working for the London County Council in the 1950s.

He started Colquhoun & Miller, a partnership with architect John Miller, in 1961. — architectsjournal.co.uk