Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. — Newsweek
Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools... View full entry
Mr. Garrett died last week at 74, just short of the 25th anniversary of Burning Man’s founding.
But his handiwork will be on display to thousands as the yearly festival begins Monday. Mr. Garrett arranged the grounds, called Black Rock City, in a series of concentric semicircles. At their center is the Man, a giant effigy meant to be immolated on the last night of the weeklong gathering.
— nytimes.com
Gary Bates, one of three founders of Space Group, a 12-year-old architecture and urban planning firm based in Oslo, Norway, was chosen over 13 other firms earlier this month by the Arena, Arts and Entertainment District Task Force's Planning and Design Committee. — kentucky.com
CTRL+5 - Remove Client’s color Palette
CTRL+6 - Remove Client’s wife’s color Palette (must press hard)
CTRL+E - Cycles through design ideologies
CTRL+F - Flatten all roofs
CTRL+H - Insert Awesomeness
CTRL+K - Justify design concept
CTRL+L - Left justify design concept
CTRL+P - Prints unemployment check
CTRL+V - Value Engineer (reduces scale by 78%)
F4 - Toggles MODERNISM
F8 -Toggles ORTHO MODE (should always be on)
F9 -Toggles POSTMODERNISM (should always be off)
F11 - Toggles ARROGANCE
— Coffee with an Architect
Jody Brown at Coffee with an Architect has come up with a revised list of Autocad Command shortcuts. I would imagine that these will quickly become the new industry standard for drafting stations everywhere. Please print and post next to your work station for future reference. And remember, to... View full entry
Fallingwater was as handmade as any of the early Modern experimental structures that, while earnestly seeking the hallowed label of prefabrication, were largely handmade, with lumpy (handcrafted!) white stucco that was smooth only if you were two miles away. Like finally seeing a real Mondrian, with all of its beautiful “imperfections,” much of building today still remains “handmade” even when it means the final connections that make a building sing. — Lamprecht archiTEXTural
Author, preservationist and historian Barbara Lamprecht takes on an earlier WSJ article called, "What's So Great About Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater?" Read her response to second question in the article: Is Fallingwater a work of modernism? View full entry
Steven M. Johnson (b. 1938) is a former urban planner and future trends analyst from California, who defines himself in terms of Chinese astrology as a tiger "with a tendency to rush forward, defend the weak, and be foolishly brave." Since the early 1970s, he has been creating scores of alternative products and systems—on paper—that he hopes will benefit "or at least amuse" his fellow consumer-citizens. — theatlantic.com
Curved buildings with mushroom roofs! Giant 3D printers spewing out ships! Swarms of high-tech workers making electric cars!
It’s all part of “Super Dock,” a futuristic science park designed by radical eco-architect Mitchell Joachim.
“There are no walls,” he said. “We’re merging architecture and land into the water. The entire area becomes a ballast for Brooklyn, so it can absorb water, clean it and filter it back into New York.”
— brooklyndaily.com
A digital dialogue about the practice of tactical urbanism and socially active design. — city-sessions.tumblr.com
This morning a magnitude 5.8 earthquake shook the East Coast. The quake was felt from Virginia to Boston, even prompting the evacuation of the Pentagon and Capitol Building in Washington, and New York City Hall. Seismologists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have stated that once every 100 years, an earthquake of at least a magnitude of 5.0 rocks NYC. — Inhabitat NYC
There is one – large – detail. Two-thirds of the original 1,000 council flats will, with the help of public subsidy to the development, now be for private sale. The council says that it's better to have a mixture of tenures than to remake a "ghetto" of council tenants. This follows the current orthodoxy and might be entirely reasonable if the homes were being replaced elsewhere in the city. — Guardian
Rowan Moore reviews Urban Splash's renovation of the 1,000-flat Park Hill estate in Sheffield, the largest listed building in Europe. The renovation of which, has even won the approval of the estate's original architects. However, Mr. Moore finds that the larger cause for concern is not the... View full entry
MGM Resorts International on Monday said it wants to destroy its Harmon building — an unfinished condo-and-hotel tower riddled with construction engineering problems. Designed by famed architect Norman Foster, the Harmon is part of the Las Vegas Strip’s $9 billion CityCenter project... — blogs.wsj.com
As we reported 3 years ago, Vegas' Harmon Hotel gets cut in half. View full entry
Following a drop of almost a full point in June, the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) fell again by more than a point in July. allSTAR believes "its time to get creative with business strategies and contracts. also not a bad time to hire risk managers"
News Following a drop of almost a full point in June, the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) fell again by more than a point in July. allSTAR believes "its time to get creative with business strategies and contracts. also not a bad time to hire risk managers" The Cupertino City Council... View full entry
For the first time in a long time, the future doesn’t look better than the past. Faced with the prospect of climate change, environmental degradation, economic upheaval and diminished resources, it’s not unexpected that architects such as Susan Fitzgerald have started to look at the world beyond the building. The Halifax practitioner, just announced as the winner of the Canada Council $50,000 Prix de Rome, will spend the next two years figuring out how cities can be made more productive. — thestar.com
Yesterday I checked out the exhibition "Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities" at the Museum of Arts and Design. Below are some highlights from this highly recommended show. — archidose.blogspot.com
This was the city of the 20th Century, but surely nobody, neither utopians or dystopians, imagined that it would look like this. It was nobody's dream and at least in theory, nobody's nightmare. How did we get here? — BBC
In his colorful article, Owen Hatherley, architecture critic and occasional Archinect editor, confronts the ugliness and its legacy 20th century post modern style buildings left the cities with. View full entry
