As the first sole woman to win the medal in its 167-year history (women have shared the prize with others before), Zaha Hadid said, "I am very proud to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal, in particular, to be the first woman to receive the honor in her own right. Part of architecture’s job is to... View full entry
From a super-sized cheese grater, to a contraceptive sponge, to an inadvertent fun house ride, the critics have thoroughly analogized the new Broad museum in mostly positive (if occasionally biting) reviews. To follow up with Amelia's review, published earlier today, we offer some other critical... View full entry
Mia Lehrer, a Los Angeles landscape architect who helped prepare a master plan for the river in 2007, said Mr. Gehry’s involvement had distressed people wary of top-down directives, and raised fears that he would derail the plan by the Army Corps of Engineers just as it was gaining momentum.
Still, she said Mr. Gehry was welcome to join the fray. “He’s a creative dude,” Ms. Lehrer said. “So the answer is, ‘Why not?’”
— The New York Times
Perhaps to escape the local ire which his involvement with the L.A. River redevelopment has drawn, Frank Gehry talked to The New York Times about his hopes for the project and for his relationship with the community. "I’m doing something that’s going to be good and trying to be inclusive, and... View full entry
The Spanish-publisher Arquitectura Viva just published a new monograph on Rem Koolhaas, their first-ever on the Dutch architect. Focusing on work since he won the Pritzker in 2000, the monograph includes an essay and twelve critical texts by Luis Fernández-Galiano alongside images of some of... View full entry
Earlier this summer, Midwest convenience store chain Kum & Go revealed a first peek at their new Renzo Piano-designed Des Moines, Iowa headquarters. The initial round of design illustrations were of a rather austere, CAD-like quality, and Archinect commenters remarked that the renderings... View full entry
This week, he signed over £285,000 of his £9m High Street Fund, created in March, to projects which will "re-energise the capital's high streets"...the mayor's office is donating to these projects through Spacehive, a civic crowdfunding website through which campaigners can raise money from the public to fund their community schemes. — CityMetric
From a proposed revitalization project known as the "Peckham Coal Line" that, much like New York City's High Line, would transform abandoned coal sidings into a foliage-rich walkway for pedestrians and cyclists, to a public library in an alley known as a "Literalley," designers and dreamers alike... View full entry
The international competition organized by think-tank New London Architecture and the Mayor of London has released 100 renderings of proposed solutions to London's housing crisis. Attracting over 200 entries from 16 countries around the world, the competition includes submissions from respected... View full entry
Perparim Rama is an award-winning architect based in London. He came to the U.K. as an asylum seeker in 1992, fleeing war and persecution in the former Yugoslavia. Here is his take on the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. — bloomberg.com
Related on Archinect:Passage: an architectural intervention to span the Mediterranean SeaRefugees Welcome: the "Airbnb for Refugees" View full entry
What is the role of creative exploration in architecture? From the L.A. Times to The New Republic, this question is very much on critical minds. In a piece entitled "How to Make Architecture Human," Anna Wiener reviews Witold Rybczynski's latest collection of essays, Mysteries of the Mall, which... View full entry
Midcentury modernist architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler may have been good friends when they studied together in Vienna, but by the time they ran into one another one last time in a Los Angeles hospital in 1953, they were bitter enemies.
Ensemble Studio Theatre/L.A.'s production of The Princes of Kings Road, now playing at the Neutra Institute in Silver Lake, imagines what it might have been like in the hospital room they shared
— laweekly.com
One of the things that we learned about SCI-Arc was that at the level of ideas, of thinking, of adventure, of imagination, of discovery ... they need accoutrements. They need support, they need tools to be realized in the world. [...]
So we looked at the situation in terms of ideas — design ideas, imaginative students, creative faculty — and we had to give them the tools to implement, meaning to draw, to model what they wanted, and to make that information then available on the outside.
— blogs.kcrw.com
Eric Owen Moss is being succeeded by Hernan Diaz Alonso, who began serving as Director of SCI-Arc earlier this summer. You can find out more about Diaz Alonso's role in our Deans List feature. View full entry
IE University announced the appointment of Martha Thorne as Dean of IE School of Architecture. Martha Thorne has served as the Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize since 2005. She held the position of Associate Curator of the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago from 1996 to 2005. [...]
Martha Thorne has formed part of the IE School of Architecture & Design management team since its inception and previously served as Associate Dean for External Relations.
— IE University
A masterplan has been unveiled for the Burj 2020 District, an upcoming megaproject set to include a skyscraper dubbed ‘the diamond of Dubai’ [...]
The centerpiece of the district, the Burj 2020 tower, will be designed by Adrian Smith and Gordin Gill (AS + GG), the architects behind the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia.
— meconstructionnews.com
"The demand that will be registering will dictate the exact height of the tower, but at the highest, it might go 700 plus," the Executive Chairman of the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, Ahmed Bin Sulayem, was quoted saying. "We are looking at a supertall tower, and we are looking at having one... View full entry
Instead of relying on a subway that breaks down and causes interminable delays, what if the 17 miles of London's Circle Line were replaced with three moving walkways, much like the ones in airports, that allow pedestrians to step on at three miles per hour and then amble over to a fast lane of... View full entry
While often referred to as the world's most famous living architect, Frank Gehry is also known as a product designer, creating pieces of furniture, jewelry, clothing and appliances. To honor these design contributions, which have included collaborations with Tiffany & Co., Louis Vuitton, and... View full entry
