A raft of museums, most backed by private money, are springing up in what is, for many, an unlikely cultural hub: Beirut, the capital of Lebanon [...]
The design competition launched on 1 October; the architect Zaha Hadid is on the jury along with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones of London's Serpentine Galleries.
Salamé, who founded the Aïshti fashion chain, invested $100m in funding a contemporary art museum, designed by the British architect David Adjaye, in Jal El Dib [...].
— theartnewspaper.com
What's interesting about these 27 categories that Wheeler has defined, covering the full range of development patterns in two dozen metropolitan regions he has studied worldwide, is that most of them are new. [..]
"We have had an explosion of different types of built landscapes in the last century," says Wheeler, who is working on a book about these patterns.
— washingtonpost.com
An example of the patterns identified by Stephen Wheeler, professor at UC Davis' Department of Human Ecology, culled from meticulous work with Google satellite imagery:You can view more of his maps here. View full entry
Looking for exciting things to do in New York City this month? Lucky you, Archtober is back for another year with a rich program of engaging exhibitions, lectures, conferences, films, tours, parties, and other activities to celebrate the value of architecture and design in everyday life.For the... View full entry
Rock Print, one of the most technologically-impressive installations at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, is the collaborative project of Gramazio Kohler Research of ETH Zürich and MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab. A towering stone assemblage put together by robots and secured with nothing more than... View full entry
Stanley Tigerman, the Chicago architect whose 1977 conference, "The State of the Art of Architecture," became the namesake for the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, has issued a statement effusively praising the Biennial's execution.Co-artistic directors of the Chicago Architecture... View full entry
I slowly became more and more of a storyteller and less and less of a painter until I embraced film-making as the only profession that really included everything I liked. It was photography and architecture, music and writing and acting—everything I liked together into one package that was called “film-making”. — The Economist
In an interview with The Economist, film director Wim Wenders speaks about the relationship of landscape and architecture in his work, and how focusing on a scene absent of anyone often amplifies the stories of everyone. "I try to make places tell their stories about us," he says. Indeed: from... View full entry
To stand a fair chance of keeping warming to just 2°C by the end of the century—the de-facto goal of global climate policy—the stock of atmospheric carbon dioxide must be kept under 1 trillion tonnes ... If emissions continue on their present course around 140 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases will be released each year and temperatures could rise by 4.5°C by 2100. And even if countries fully honour their recent pledges, temperatures may still increase by 3.5°C by then. — the Economist
In the article, the author lays out an argument that "when negotiators meet in Paris, they need to keep in mind that the world is already suffering from the effects of global warming." At the crux of it lies the fact that the current, so-called "ambitious" plans of the world's largest economies... View full entry
Humans have sculpted the landscape in their image ever since the age of the anthropocene began – but aside from our delusions of grandeur (Mt. Rushmore) or engineering marvels (Panama Canal), our sadder, more pathetic selves have also made their mark on the Earth. Sad Topographies, a selection... View full entry
What is a village? More importantly, how rapidly can one be formed? The 150 academics, students and practicing architects participating in Project Village set out to answer these questions by constructing an entire community in a week, including a stage, a pub, and a residential building. ... View full entry
For the first few seconds you’re blind in the darkness. Then a reflex forces your pupils wider and your photoreceptor rod cells become more sensitive, sending a neural signal that alerts you to four glowing cubes that seem to be floating in mid-air in front of your body. It takes another few... View full entry
The art history department recently announced a new minor program in architectural studies, enabling students to pursue a program of study dedicated specifically to architecture for the first time ever. [...]
The architectural studies program is currently being offered only as a minor. “We would like to set up a dedicated major, perhaps even an interdisciplinary one, in the future,” Taylor said, but an option to major specifically in architectural studies is not yet available.
— chicagomaroon.com
In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert, between the site of the first atomic bomb test and the U.S.-Mexico border, a new city is rising from the sand.
Planned for a population of 35,000, the city will showcase a modern business district downtown, and neat rows of terraced housing in the suburbs. It will be supplied with pristine streets, parks, malls and a church.
But no one will ever call it home.
— CNN
Planned by the telecommunications and tech firm Pegasus Global Holdings, the CITE (Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation) is a $1 billion plan to build a model city to test out and develop new technologies.With specialized zones for agriculture, energy, and water treatment, the city would... View full entry
“There's absolutely nothing wrong with a development that primarily aims to bring new people into the neighborhood, including people who don’t have the same profile as the people who already live there,” [...]
Couldn’t the restaurant’s cheerleaders see how it was a little sad that in a place where mostly black students had once learned about carpentry and the culinary arts, mostly white people were now drinking rosé?
— phillymag.com
Cities can’t win. When they do well, people resent them as citadels of inequality; when they do badly, they are cesspools of hopelessness. In the seventies and eighties, the seemingly permanent urban crisis became the verdict that American civilization had passed on itself. Forty years later, cities mostly thrive, crime has been in vertiginous decline, the young cluster together in old neighborhoods [...] —and so big cities turn into hateful centers of self-absorbed privilege. — newyorker.com
But the very fact that this question takes such a polarized on-off form is a symptom of the way urban space in our day is being stretched on the rack of inequality, with capital either too-present or not present at all. And the questions of displacement...lurk somewhere on the horizon. — artnet News
On the eve of Chicago's first-ever Architecture Biennial, Ben Davis ties together three stories - the restored Chicago Art Expo, the spectacular gala benefit preview of Chicago artist Theaster Gates's new Stony Island Arts Bank and a battle over community control and school closings... View full entry