The Royal Institute of British Architects named internationally acclaimed Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger as the recipient of the 2012 Royal Gold Medal. Aaron Lim griped "@Orhan, I completely agree. A lifetime's work of innovative social ideas remains largely unrecognized by the architectural establishment today: his work remains fresh after all these years."
In the latest installment of Archinect’s Contours feature EDD DE 1101 I - Part 2, Guy Horton claims "Unemployment is one of the worst things that can happen to you in a society that places so much emphasis on career and financial advancement. The unemployed are so stigmatized in our... View full entry
This is John Hill’s element, and these are his people. Hill has begun to emerge, in the past five years or so, as one of New York’s great architectural communicators, an exquisitely informed tour guide for the layman design enthusiast. His main platform has been his website, A Daily Dose of Architecture, which, if it does not quite stand astride the world of design blogs, nevertheless lords over a small sub-fiefdom of largely unstaffed, noncommercial sites. — capitalnewyork.com
It was, on the whole, a quiet year for architecture, the lack of widespread construction activity reflecting the lingering impact of the 2008 financial crisis. But there were still new buildings to celebrate, along with rare victories for historic preservationists and an even rarer accolade for Chicago architect Jeanne Gang. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com
As we approach the end of 2011, more and more attention will be applied towards answering the profound question: why is this year different than any other year (or why was it the same)? To facilitate this scrutiny, I've called upon Architecture Research Office (ARO) and Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN), the recently announced Architecture Design and Landscape Architecture winners, respectively, of Cooper Hewitt's National Design Awards. — huffingtonpost.com
The underwater mortgages and overleveraged loans that underlie this latest great contraction result in significant part from valuing both residential and commercial buildings merely as investment vehicles rather than as complex and consequential things-in-the-world. And on this urgent issue, which places buildings at the very center of key political and economic debates, architecture critics have been mostly missing in action. — Places
Thomas Fisher dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, reviews the state of architectural criticism. Are the days of a professional critic who writes for a major newspaper over? Has architectural criticism been weakened by the globalization and commodification of the... View full entry
For if there is one abiding historical certainty it is that, eventually, things change. And they can be made to change. There is no such thing, however, as a revolutionary architecture. Nor does history ever simply start from scratch. Instead, post-revolutionary questions can be posed in advance to infrastructures that already exist.... to reinvent what used to be called housing, schools, hospitals, factories, and farms in a way that asks: What else must change for these changes to be possible? — Places Journal
Reinhold Martin argues that architects must plan for post-revolutionary conditions. A follow-up to his earlier essay for Places, "Occupy: What Architecture Can Do." View full entry
In the late ’80s, before he became famous as a member of the Compton, Calif., gangsta-rap group N.W.A., Ice Cube studied architectural drafting at a trade school in Arizona. This biographical detail makes the rapper’s appearance in a new video celebrating midcentury design icons Charles and Ray Eames only slightly less incongruous. — NYT
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The winner of the 2012 TED Prize has just been announced, and being awarded is not a single person, but - for the first time in the history of the prize - a collaborative idea: the City 2.0.
TED Prize Director Amy Novogratz: "This year, we’re challenging everyone in the TED Community to embrace radical collaboration on one of the most pressing issues we face: how to build sustainable, vibrant, working cities."
— bustler.net
Last year, when BIG unveiled its fantastical ski resort on top of a waste-to-energy incinerator plant in Copenhagen, we were admittedly intrigued. But we weren’t at all surprised when the City of Copenhagen denied the project yesterday because they believe it will damage the climate and environment. — Inhabitat.com
If firmness, utility, and delight are the enduring pinnacles of architectural achievement, then it would appear architecture’s moral destiny is a foregone conclusion. But is it possible that opportunities for valuable cultural insight are being lost out of deference to this legacy? We examine forces, trends, and ideas that enhance the significance of the built environment despite, or due to, their deviant nature. — MAS CONTEXT
Latest issue of MAS CONTEXT now available on-line - fresh content from Lebbeus Woods, Paul Shepheard, Jürgen Mayer H, formlessfinder, Luis Urculo, and...MAS! Also includes the next part of the 3-part video series "Architecture and the Unspeakable" from our studio: the Shibuya Tower Project... View full entry
Speaking at the V&A last week, the former Foreign Office Architects partner said that she was "dubious" about volunteers who see working in these places as an "easy option". — Architectural Record
Moussavi, who teaches at Harvard and runs her own practice in London, said: "It's quite telling that Harvard students, when they want to be activists, have to go to these areas of the world. It's tougher to be an activist in America. View full entry
A few days ago, we published the winners of the Architect's Eye Awards, a British competition celebrating excellence in architectural photography. Today, we are happy to also post all finalists from the 'Architecture and People' category. — bustler.net
The source of the disconnect between San Francisco's transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called "level of service," or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. — Eric Jaffe
Changing a city from being car-centric isn't just a matter of building better bike lanes and drawing up better bus routes. Sometimes, developers have to go up against restrictions which won't let them build at all if it interrupts too much car traffic. View full entry
Nona Yehia and Jefferson Ellinger established the architectural firm, Ellinger/Yehia Design LLC in 2003 to investigate links between architecture, landscape and technology. In 2004, the firm opened an office in Jackson Hole, Wyoming to further explore these inter-relationships. Architects... View full entry
Built on a temporary site and made entirely from recycled shipping containers, London's latest retail park lays claim to be the world's first ever "pop-up" shopping mall. The aptly-named "Boxpark" opened for business today along a vacant strip of east London's fashionable Shoreditch High Street. It is composed of 60 standard-size shipping containers, stacked two stories high and five rows wide. — cnn.com