You might have already heard that Amazon opened its first physical bookstore earlier this week, called (in very non-SEO fashion) Amazon Books. Located in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle – ironically within a mall that used to house a Barnes & Noble – most everything in the brick-and-mortar... View full entry
It’s a reminder that decommunisation is a project which might actually be physically impossible to execute in full, which hopefully begs the question — if Soviet Ukraine can't be wished away, what should be conserved, and what should be rejected? [...]
The nationalist purging of any traces of socialism from the landscape is a fool’s errand at best, gross historical revisionism at worst.
— calvertjournal.com
Related on Archinect:Owen Hatherley on the mass housing history of Moscow’s suburbsMoscow skaters reclaiming hidden spaces on top of Soviet-era buildingsParadise lost? The enduring legacy of a Soviet-era utopian workers’ district View full entry
[...] one year after announcing the concept of its game-changing MULTI elevator technology, ThyssenKrupp unveils a fully-functional 1:3 scale model at its Innovation Center in Gijn, Spain. The MULTI system uses linear motors instead of ropes, enabling horizontal movement and transforming conventional elevator transportation into vertical metro systems. — bloomberg.com
Previously on Archinect: ThyssenKrupp's cable-free elevator test tower tops out in less than 10 monthsUp and Down, Side to Side; ThyssenKrupp's cable-free MULTI elevator to begin testing in 2016 View full entry
The [Lower Manhattan Development Corp's] latest take envisions a roughly 80,000-square-foot building, rising three to four stories aboveground, where new works of theater, dance, music and digital art would be produced, said the center’s director, Maggie Boepple.
Over the past few months, center officials have been working with consultants and an unnamed architectural firm to revamp the plan.
— Wall Street Journal
The new plan for the center won't be formally unveiled until the next board meeting of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. However, this smaller, less expensive version is still expected to function as a "a gathering place for downtown residents" according to Catherine McVay... View full entry
Julia Ingalls highlighted the work of Design Build Research (DBR), based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Currently a non-profit institute led by architect Michael Green and creative entrepreneur Scott Hawthorn, one of the earliest projects was building a theater when TED headquarters’ moved... View full entry
It's great to be back. Our second season of Archinect Sessions premieres today in a new, shorter format, with an episode devoted to the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and featuring special guest Cynthia Davidson, director of Log and co-curator of the US Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Biennale... View full entry
As the evening progresses, the event turns into a painful X-ray of the current state of American academia: a strangely insular world with its own autonomous codes, dominated by some antiquated pecking order with an estranged value system and no hope of a correction from within. The often grandiose character of the debate stands in stark contrast to the marginal nature of that which is being debated. — Reinier de Graaf
Reinier de Graaf, partner at OMA, delivers a scathing takedown of the current state of architecture academia as represented by the participants of the ArchAgenda Debates, a panel in which he was also a participant. Alongside Jeff Kipnis, Patrik Schumacher, Peter Eisenman, and Theodore... View full entry
With the issues of serving openly in the military and same-sex marriage now largely resolved, the fight for all-gender restrooms has emerged as the latest civil rights issue in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (L.G.B.T.) community — particularly the “T” part.
Schools and universities (...), museums (...), restaurants (...) and even the White House (...) are recasting the traditional men’s/women’s room, resulting in a dizzying range of (often creative) signage and vocabulary.
— the New York Times
The design consumes less coveted park space than expected, while introducing a contemporary aesthetic that evokes Frank Gehry’s museum in Bilbao, Spain, in its undulating exterior and Turkey’s underground city of Cappadocia in its cavelike interior. [...]
Ms. Gang said she was looking to conjure spaces that have been created by forces of nature, such as “geological canyons, glacial forms,” and to foster a sense of connectivity and discovery.
— nytimes.com
Studio Gang's plans for the Gilder Center addition were approved by the Museum's board this past Wednesday, but have yet to undergo the public approval process. If everything continues on-schedule, the addition will open by 2020.According to a press release issued by the Museum: The conceptual... View full entry
Tomorrow (!!!) we'll premiere season two of Archinect Sessions, and in anticipation of the launch, we've been posting Mini-Sessions – interviews recorded during our first-ever live-podcasting series, "Next Up", held at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles' Chinatown and at the opening... View full entry
NCARB is phasing out the ARE 4.0 and introducing the ARE 5.0 in late 2016, which means that depending where you are with your licensing exams, you'll probably need to figure out how your ARE 4.0 credits apply to the new version. Anticipating this need, the NCARB has released a "Transition... View full entry
“Pedagogy and Place: Celebrating 100 Years of Architecture Education at Yale”... will present YSoA alumni work and archival documents tracing the development of architecture education at Yale and the buildings that have housed the architecture program. [...]
An auxiliary installation ... depicts more than 30 architecture schools from around the world to further illuminate the evolution of architecture education and the relationship between pedagogy and place.
— news.yale.edu
The free and public exhibition “Pedagogy and Place” opens December 3 and is on display through May 7, 2016, located in Yale's Rudolph Hall gallery at 180 York St.More news from the Yale School of Architecture:Get Lectured: Yale, Fall '15Deborah Berke named Dean of Yale School of Architecture... View full entry
In the microbial metropolises that thrive in and on the human body, underground networks of viruses loom large. A closer look at human skin has found that it's teeming with viruses, most of which don't target us but infect the microbes that live there.
Almost 95 percent of those skin-dwelling virus communities are unclassified...Those unknown viruses may prune, manipulate, and hide out in the skin’s bacterial communities, which in turn can make the difference between human health and disease...
— Ars Technica
Further reading: Architecture of the Anthropocene, Pt. 2: Haunted Houses, Living Buildings, and Other Horror StoriesBetween Sampling and Dowsing: Field Notes from GRNASFCKStudy finds antibacterial soap no more effective than regular soapEven bacteria are architectsCities Of The Future, Built By... View full entry
Most architects don’t build economic engines into their projects, and [Assemble's Anna] Lisogorskaya is quick to note that this type of intervention doesn’t make sense everywhere.
[...]
But she does argue that things such as economic sustainability and local jobs are inherently interconnected with any effort to rehabilitate a neighbourhood. The architecture is only part of the project, and can only do so much on its own.
— The Guardian
Leading up to (and continuing after) the premiere of Archinect Sessions' second season on November 5, we're posting individual interviews as Mini-Sessions from our first-ever live-podcasting series, "Next Up", held at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles' Chinatown and at the opening weekend... View full entry