Architects do a lousy job of selling their ideas to the general public, said Bjarke Ingels, on Thursday morning during his keynote address at Architectural Record’s annual Innovation conference in New York. They need to “find ways to present their ideas or concerns in words that are so clear that non-architects will actually take an interest in them” — archrecord.construction.com
Experts in the building industry don’t expect the slump to end anytime soon—especially for the big marquee commissions for which Gehry is known. “The U.S. domestic market is not in the position right now to fund [major] projects in the private or public sector,” says Clark Manus, president at the American Institute of Architects and chief executive officer at San Francisco-based Heller Manus Architects. “This is the new normal.” — businessweek.com
"It was a shock to come out [of graduate school] and realize [modern architects] were a public enemy,” Chipperfield said.
This “hostile public opinion,” he said, was the result of poor work by the previous generation of architects, whose bad reputation became projected onto Chipperfield and his contemporaries. Furthermore, the damage to England’s monuments and other edifices caused in World War II contributed to the public’s grim outlook on architecture, he added.
— yaledailynews.com
On Wednesday Lord Foster announced a plan so big that even Burnham would have been impressed. The Thames Hub, a £50bn project devised by architects Foster and Partners, planners and builders Halcrow and Volterra, a consultancy group of British economists, aims to revolutionise Britain's often creaking and largely inadequate national transport and energy infrastructure. — guardian.co.uk
When, in June 2009, the High Line Park opened to the public, it was declared an almost unqualified success. Some architecture critics nit-picked the design, but basically they endorsed it, and ordinary folk (I include myself in that category), less fastidious, greeted it with enthusiasm. — Phillip Lopate, via places.designobserver.com
We're excited to announce the next round of Archinect Sessions, to kick off on Saturday, November 5th, at the Neutra VDL House, in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, in collaboration with Cal Poly Pomona. Archinect Sessions is a series of discussions with architects, academics and other interesting... View full entry
The Green House concept is the most comprehensive effort to reinvent the nursing home ...— including the way medical care is delivered. In traditional nursing homes, employees typically have narrowly defined jobs ... based on efficiency that tends to ignore individuals’ preferences and needs. — New York Times
While during the last decade most of the people have become fascinated by, and began researching into, the vast population growths of cities and their consequences, everybody got so excited that it was forgotten that even now half of the world's population is actually living in non-urban areas. — MONU magazine
NEW CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR MONU #16 - NON-URBANISM Some six years ago and in one of our first issues - MONU #4 - one of the contributors explained "how suburbs destroy democracy" when people live in high degree of residential and cultural isolation and individualism. By that time he could not... View full entry
Retrofitting their home to eliminate feathered fatalities has worked for Brophy and Lutz. But a growing chorus of bird enthusiasts are advocating avian-friendly architecture at the design stage as the best prevention. It's a national movement that started in Chicago and has spread to other major cities, including the Twin Cities. — startribune.com
If you happen to be in Miami, Florida this November, make sure to check out the upcoming exhibition DawnTown Miami | The First Four Years of Ideas which will open on November 9th, 2011 at the University of Miami School of Architecture. The opening and reception begins at 6:30pm at the Irvin Korach Gallery, and marks the first retrospective ever produced by DawnTown. — bustler.net
Find images of the winning DawnTown Miami projects from the previous four years in the image gallery below. View full entry
Archinect’s newest ShowCase features the Herta and Paul Amir Building at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art by Preston Scott Cohen, Inc., with photographs by Amit Geron. collage thinks that while the "The interiors are wonderful! The facets on the exterior would benefit from being abit smaller...". For his part eric chavkin questions "Is all of the interior dynamics necessarily?....I wonder how, or if, the museum artworks would be effected by the architecture?"
Archinect’s newest ShowCase features the new Herta and Paul Amir Building at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art by Preston Scott Cohen, Inc., with photographs by Amit Geron. All the commenters thought the building was a beauty. However, they had a number of questions or suggestions regarding the... View full entry
Chicago architect Jeanne Gang, hired in March to come up with a new design for downtown Lexington's empty CentrePointe block, is no longer involved in the project, developer Dudley Webb said Thursday.
Webb said Gang and her firm Studio Gang Architects were hired to do a master plan for the block "and share her vision of what she thought this project might be."
— kentucky.com
a floating dome, built with the spokes of dead umbrellas and carried over the waves by the invisible power of empty soda bottles.... was due to begin a monthlong exhibit on Friday in a finger of water in Inwood, at the northern end of Manhattan.
“We were floating it on pontoons to Inwood from the South Bronx.”
A pause.
“We shipwrecked,” she said. “On Rikers Island.”
If this is failure, it is of a type rooted in genius.
— New York Times
“If you take a percentage and you work with western salaries, you can’t make it work,” Gehry said. “So it almost forces you to open an office in China and work with local people.” — Frank Gehry, via bloomberg.com
“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Mr. Bohlin said last week, a few days after Mr. Jobs’s death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.” — nytimes.com
Oh, look, Bohlin Cywinski is hiring. View full entry