Led by growing demand for new schools, hospitals, cultural facilities and municipal buildings, the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) increased in May following its second monthly drop this year. [...] (AIA) reported the May ABI score was 51.9, up from a mark of 48.8 in April. This score reflects an increase in design services (any score above 50 indicates an increase in billings). The new projects inquiry index was 61.5, up from a reading of 60.1 the previous month. — calculatedriskblog.com
Amelia Taylor-Hochberg penned What makes an artless museum?, which reviewed the February Sky-lit event/preview of the new Broad Museum. Therein she argues that it provided "an opportunity for the architecture to be treated as a relational art object, but not so it could be handled with velvet... View full entry
The path for foreign architects seeking licensure in the US just got a lot more familiar. NCARB has decided to discontinue the Broadly Experienced Foreign Architect (BEFA) Program, its previous credentials for architects already licensed in another country to gain US licensure, and stripped it... View full entry
Aesthetics is a primary concern for Ban—not despite, but especially in humanitarian scenarios. He believes that beauty is a basic need, an aspect of a person’s dignity. Erecting beautiful, if simple, structures can ensure that a refugee camp is not labeled a slum. So, when examining available materials in Kobe, he fussed about the color of the beer crates, choosing Asahi’s more neutral plastic bins over Kirin’s glaring red crates. — qz.com
Last week, Ban visited several U.S. cities on a brief lecture tour, captivating audiences with his thoughts about "the Temporary and the Monumental." Read Archinect's report from his Los Angeles lecture at LACMA here. View full entry
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development embraced the trapezoid, dubbed Iberville-Treme, along with an exhaustive New Orleans plan that called for 2,314 apartments constructed within 54 months.
Yet after 48 months — four years — the work in New Orleans is far from done.
If construction continues at the same pace in coming years, the promised 2,314 apartments won’t be complete until 2026.
— nextcity.org
The ideals of Novye Cheryomushki may have died, but its methods and techniques remain — having managed to make some people very wealthy. Moscow suburbia is not so much the remnants of a great experiment, perhaps, but suburbia like any other suburbia — a place of dreams and boredom, great ideas being implemented and then slowly crushed. — calvertjournal.com
In Orange, Texas, the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans just built a large Confederate memorial park, complete with a classical-ish monument featuring 13 columns—one for each of the states in the short-lived, and utterly defeated, Confederate States of America. [...]
And this being Confederate sympathizers, they did not hesitate to build the memorial where the highway meets Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.
— citylab.com
Related:Building the First Slavery Museum in AmericaHow America is failing to preserve its historic slave markets View full entry
"The river was part of its immediate environment. To move it to higher ground where it never floods would be ridiculous. You would ask: 'Why is it on stilts?' It makes no sense to me." — chicagotribune.com
All along, Mies van der Rohe's iconic design for the retreat of Dr. Edith Farnsworth was intended to withstand floodwaters, but in the past 19 years, the house has flooded three times, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. These incidents were partially blamed on rapid suburban... View full entry
All those things that people talk about but you don't realize it until you go through it yourself... not feeling adequate, feeling like a failure...
Rosa Sheng, founder of Equity by Design and architect at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson in San Francisco, talks with KQED's Aarti Shahani about the hemorrhaging of women in architecture after graduation. Nowadays, about half of architecture graduates are women, but in the practicing workforce, that... View full entry
Collectively, the encyclical affirms how important it is to make the moral case for city design. Too often, developers, urban planners and city leaders seem to think that it is obvious or implied why the decisions they make are in the best interest of the public. But there is no shortcut to articulating why our planning choices speak to the fundamental human dignity of the communities we’re working in. — nextcity.org
"Given the interrelationship between living space and human behaviour, those who design buildings, neighbourhoods, public spaces and cities, ought to draw on the various disciplines which help us to understand people’s thought processes, symbolic language and ways of acting. It is not enough to... View full entry
While the employment market is very ripe for job-seeking architects at the moment, there’s no guarantee that some of those opportunities won’t turn out rotten. The architecture profession is infamous for its highly skewed work-life balance, emphasis on the work, and office culture may not... View full entry
What is the role of installation in architecture? More importantly, how does a curator arrange an installation that is primarily concerned with the effects of installation? “Bigger Than a Breadbox," which held its public opening reception on June 17th, is partly the brainchild of BSA... View full entry
Easily the biggest news of last week, and probably of this year, was the unveiling of BIG's design for 2WTC. For a project of such status, on such a highly charged site, representation must be handled with expert care – so to dig a bit deeper into the splashy video introducing 2WTC, we spoke... View full entry
Tall buildings specialist Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS + GG) has been chosen by the master developer of Dubai’s Jumeirah Lakes Towers (JLT) district to design the Burj 2020 tower - set to be the world’s tallest commercial tower. [...]
The Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat ranks New York’s One World Trade Center as the world’s tallest commercial tower, at 541 metres. The height of Burj 2020 is yet to be revealed.
— thenational.ae
Fittingly, Poolside’s version of “Harvest Moon” echoed off the wooden planks of the Broad Arts Center at UCLA on June 10th as a crowd of optimists, architects, and Ira-Glass lookalikes drank their way in and out of the opening reception for BI(h)OME, Kevin Daly Architects’ proposed... View full entry
