Among facets that critics may seize upon — and, this being N.Y.U., there will certainly be critics — is that the screens express technology’s new primacy, all but obscuring traditional forms of scholarship behind a cascade of random data. Critics may also discern a feeling of defeat in having to undertake such a fundamental alteration in the hope of saving students’ lives. — cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com
Ratner & Co. believe Brooklyn as a whole is already well on its way to super-premium status and will never go back. They believe Ratner has built exactly the sort of architectural showpiece and modern sports-and-entertainment megaplex that the newly gentrified Brooklynites want. — New York Magazine
Will Leitch asks now that the fighting is over and Bruce Ratner’s Barclays Center is almost completed, will the crowds come? Additionally, Aaron Plewke recently snapped some photos of the building under construction. View full entry
The general Idea from my interpretation was to produce a lightweight structure that uses minimal material yet uses technology to account for the lack of girth and material. - Rogelio Mercado — Rogelio Mercado
The buildings are always designed with redundant structural assemblies to resist forces that might happen maybe .001 time of their existence and sometimes never. So what happens when all that structural apparatus and weight has taken out from an experimental "structure" is explained to a group of... View full entry
d3 publications, offering global perspectives on architecture, culture, technology, and production, just announced the launch of the first volume of d3:dialog: >assemble. Here's the official announcement we've received from d3: >assemble will debut at the Beijing International Book Fair and... View full entry
Dawson City spent more than $600,000 last year dealing with damage to roads and pipes caused by melting permafrost.
A recently-published report says the shifting ground, a result of climate change, can do a lot of damage to infrastructure such as water and sewer systems.
— cbc.ca
For a Middle East-based client he's not allowed to identify, Johnson worked on a project back in the late 2000s designing a building that would have been a mile-and-a-half tall, with 500 stories. Somewhat of a theoretical practice, the design team identified between 8 and 10 inventions that would have had to take place to build a building that tall. Not innovations, Johnson says, but inventions, as in completely new technologies and materials. — theatlanticcities.com
[Alan] Brake will be taking over as executive editor at the end of the month, when Julie Iovine steps down. A veteran of The New York Times, she has led the paper for almost six years, including a vast expansion online that has seen considerable gains in web traffic, as well as the launching of new editions of the paper and conferences. — New York Observer
In his role as executive editor, Brake, who has been at the paper for three years, wants to add more criticism to the paper and more visual story telling. In recent years, as the recession has dampened the focus on high-end, high-design work, the focus has shifted to urbanism and landscape... View full entry
LIGHT HOUSES: ON THE NORDIC COMMON GROUND FINLAND, NORWAY AND SWEDEN, NORDIC PAVILION “COMMON GROUND” 13. MOSTRA INTERNAZIONALE DI ARCHITETTURA LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA, 29 AUGUST – 25 NOVEMBER, 2012 The exhibition celebrates the jubilee of the Nordic Pavilion designed fifty years... View full entry
Why bother, then? It’s a key building in the history of structural engineering, and its unusual form, a poured-concrete cantilevered shell, has few if any equals in modern engineering. Almost nothing else looks like this building, and in a world of carbon-copy architecture, its loopy, futuristic curves are unique: a concrete rocket ship amid Chicago’s glass boxes. A little weird, yes, but the more you look at it, the more you like it. — vanityfair.com
Sydney spent three times its original $2 billion Games budget—its Olympics facilities still operate at a loss. Most of Athens’ stadia remain empty, some in graffiti-covered disrepair. — thedailybeast.com
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and his wife were trying to find a nice San Francisco neighborhood for their young family to call home... they found what they were looking for, a 6,300-square-foot lot occupied by an early 1900s home that they now want to demolish to make way for a new house... The planned tear-down has ignited a Page Six controversy, pitting the rights of new tech money against an old community... trying to stop change on one of the city's most idyllic streets. — news.cnet.com
Urbanism is one of those malleable concepts that defy definition. A flexible subject where, by trying to lock it within a specific scope, its validity sometimes gets undermined and its potential spoiled. But when a magazine develops and maintains its own way to portray the multiple faces, forms... View full entry
Artinfo spoke with Cathy Lang Ho curator of "Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good" the American Pavilion's inherently political theme at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. 18x32 opined "Go reread The Society of the Spectacle, get back to me with a new headline.—ed." The link is to a wikipedia entry on Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
News Wiel Arets it was announced, has been named Dean of Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture. lletdownl wrote in response to the news "This news had been floating around, and i had my fingers crossed. Though i know almost nothing about how good a job Arets will be able... View full entry
Using natural soil and sand, the Stone Spray can construct intricate solid structures at almost any location, even on vertical surfaces. The device was developed by architects Petr Novikov, Inder Shergill, and Anna Kulik as a research project to experiment with applying the concepts of digital manufacturing to construction work. — gizmag.com
Visit the Stone Spray website. View full entry
This week, architects and city staff met with marine scientists for the first time and heard the verdict: Maltzan's dream of a Key West-style reef with corals and easily visible sea life would remain just that in Tampa Bay waters. Now the architect is going back to the drawing board, looking for more realistic ways to present the centerpiece feature of the Lens, as the replacement of the current Pier is known. — tampabay.com