Julia Ingalls wrote about architectural solutions, four major U.S. cities have used, to address homelessness. no_form quipped "Giving homeless people housing solves homelessness. Wow, fucking brilliant. Took long enough to recognize the obvious." Plus, Nicholas Korody previewed Anupama... View full entry
With the new mayor focusing our attention on smart development and social equality, 2016 will be a banner year for the London Festival of Architecture. Election watchers will be familiar with many of this year’s hot topics: community spaces, social housing, docklands renewal. But considering the theme this year is ‘community’, there will be something for every tribe of Londoner. Out of 300 events, we’ve picked the 10 must-sees. — thespaces.com
See related news here: This week's picks for London architecture and design events London's Natural History Museum to create outdoor exhibition spaces Zaha Hadid's repertoire is a stunning display in Venice's Palazzo Franchetti View full entry
Liverpool's Riba North will have conference facilities and a gallery "at its heart", a spokeswoman said.
It will open in August with an exhibition of designs for Liverpool that were never built.
The centre, which will be housed in the Broadway Malyan-designed Mann Island on the city's waterfront, "will offer a magnificent opportunity to display Riba's historic collections, telling hundreds of years of the UK's extraordinary architectural history", Duncan said.
— bbc.com
More UK news here:Edinburgh's maker-architects: a visit to GRASLondon's Natural History Museum to create outdoor exhibition spacesBrighton's Embassy Court by Wells Coates featured in new film View full entry
[Airbnb] says it will spend the next several months reviewing how hosts and guests interact on the site and what it could do to ensure users are treated more fairly. [...]
"The bottom line is that the design of platforms dictates the decisions that people make on them. Even if there’s implicit bias, [Airbnb has] an enormous amount of ability to change the extent of discrimination on the platform."
— washingtonpost.com
For more on the controversial P2P renting service:Airbnb invests in a blockchain futureYou may have Airbnb to thank for that low hotel rateAirbnb intentionally misconstrued data to "garner good press", according to new reportAirbnb rentals cut deep into San Francisco housing stock, report... View full entry
THE Palestinians’ new national museum is a striking monument to the state they don’t yet have. Designed by a firm in Dublin, the museum itself is angular and modern, with glass curtain walls topped by smooth white limestone. From afar it looks almost like a low-slung bunker perched on a hill north of Ramallah; inside, though, it is light and airy. A terraced garden stretches out below, filled with dozens of local species...
Only one thing is missing—the exhibits.
— the Economist
A series of curatorial disputes, as well as cost overruns and delays in part attributable to the occupation of the West Bank by Israel, mean the new Palestinian National Museum will open this month without its inaugural exhibitions. The museum was designed by the Irish firm Heneghan Peng.In... View full entry
[Garth England's] extraordinary drawings, made in Hengrove Lodge care home between 2006 and 2013 and published in a beautiful book called Murdered with Straight Lines, capture the changing city through the eyes of this post-war everyman. Born in Bristol general hospital in 1935, England spent most of his 79 years in the city’s suburban south: in Knowle West, Hengrove, Bedminster and Totterdown... — The Guardian
The essence of a city isn't just contained in its physical brick and mortar, but in the memory of its denizens. Garth England, who managed to see virtually every type of structure in Bristol in his work as a milk delivery man, began to draw his artistic recollections while in a retirement home... View full entry
Andrea Dietz spent four days in Venice reporting on the Biennale's opening for us, and brought back her reflections on the hallowed event—in all its chaotic, problematic, inspiring, messy glory—to discuss with us on the podcast. Amidst the fray, one thing came out clearly: the map is not the... View full entry
In the early 1960s, [Penn State's] international studies were confined mainly to books and photos — until George Ehringer and his classmates organized a semester in London, the department’s first official study abroad trip. Ehringer, who earned his bachelor of science in architecture from Penn State in 1964, recently made a $25,000 gift to create the George D. Ehringer, Class of 1964, Award for Study Abroad in the Department Architecture... — Penn State News
According to this warmhearted account, from unwittingly meeting Buckminster Fuller ("He was never introduced. It was only later we learned it was Buckminster Fuller!”) to developing relationships that lasted for decades, studying abroad in London ultimately benefitted the 1964 Penn State... View full entry
It is a simple sculpture: 64 concrete pyramids that stand in a perfect circle around two-and-a-half acres of rippling, black volcanic rock.
Known as “Espacio Escultórico” (“Sculptural Space”), the sculpture was inaugurated in 1979 here on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. It is considered one of the most important pieces of land art in Mexico, a tranquil oasis in a chaotic city.
— the New York Times
"But the recent construction of a white eight-story building nearby has prompted a furious protest that pits the university’s needs against Mexico’s cultural heritage."For more news from the Distrito Federal, check out these links:How one architect is working to fix Mexico... View full entry
"If you design for everyone to drive, then what will you get? Congestion." [...]
“We really need to shift now, from a situation like this, where you have a heavy parking load associated with an apartment building in a very urban setting, to way less parking,” [...]
"You really have to start with the density and less parking. If you don't, then you've lost your opportunity, because once you've built that infrastructure, it's so difficult to undo that."
— news.wabe.org
More on the parking problem and pedestrian infrastructure:Los Angeles County has 3.3 parking spots for every car, taking up 14 percent of its landTrading Parking Lots for Affordable HousingDanish parking garage invites to stay and playOne Woman's Quest to Design Parking Lots People Don't... View full entry
Surfing on this social media hype, the German Architecture Museum (DAM) and the Wüstenrot Foundation have started using the hashtag #SOSBrutalism to make these buildings visible worldwide in order to contribute to saving those that are currently threatened.
"Brutalism represents an anti-attitude, an anti-idyll," says campaign co-initiator Philip Kurz, of the Wüstenrot Foundation. [...]
The German Architecture Museum also plans to create an exhibition next year based on its online campaign.
— dw.com
"Some 900 buildings - from London to Abidjan, from Tokyo to Caracas - are already documented on the website sosbrutalism.org. Among the structures featured in the database, some have already been demolished while others are currently endangered."Related stories in the Archinect news:Brutal paper... View full entry
Reporting from the Front seeks to also explore which forces—political, institutional or other—drive the architecture that goes “beyond the banal and self-harming”. The 2016 Venice Biennale calls for entries that not only exist in and of themselves, but that are a part of a larger social... View full entry
In a region at once feared and exoticized, we have been witnessing for more than a generation the devastation of old centers and the rise of new ones. Today there is no better context in which to investigate the complexities of global practice in architecture than that of the rapidly changing Arab city. — Places Journal
How does the deeply traditional meet the hypermodern in the older centers of Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo, and in the emerging new cities of Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi? In Amale Andraos’ new article on Places, and in the new book, The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, she explores the... View full entry
This year's Biennale has tried to raise fundamental issues around the role of the architect through social and economic issues. Challenges of social inequality, housing, urbanisation, are found across the world but perhaps they are nowhere more apparent than in the cities of Brazil.The Curator of... View full entry
It is not the first time, though, that a design like this has been pitched for the university. However inadvertently, the DS+R design resembles another proposal for the campus—a draft project that was eventually revised. While the resemblance between two draft renderings is hardly consequential, this one comes as a surprise, given the nature of the projects and the history between the firms. — City Lab
Raking only the choicest aesthetic muck, in this piece Kriston Capps wonders at the passing similarities between Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects' initial proposed design for the University of Chicago's David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts and Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro's... View full entry
