... the ball most commonly seen today was first designed in the 1960s by architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose forte was designing buildings using minimal materials. Previously, leather soccer balls consisted of 18 sections stitched together: six panels of three strips apiece. The soccer ball Fuller designed stitched together 20 hexagons with 12 pentagons for a total of 32 panels. Its official shape is a spherical polyhedron, but the design was nicknamed the “buckyball.” — mentalfloss.com
Recognizing excellence in Modernist residential design throughout North Carolina.Public online voting for the 2014 George Matsumoto Prize, which recognizes excellence in North Carolina Modernist residential design, begins June 15.Sponsored by the award-winning non-profit architecture organization... View full entry
Architecture, however, is a social art, rather than a personal one, a reflection of a society and its values rather than a medium of individual expression. So it’s a problem when the prevailing trend is one of franchises, particularly those of the globe-trotters: Renzo, Rem, Zaha and Frank.
It’s exciting to bring high-powered architects in from outside... But in the long run it’s wiser to nurture local talent; instead of starchitects, locatects.
— tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com
Amelia released audio from an interview with architect, preservationist and filmmaker Malachi Connolly, director of "Built on Narrow Land". NewsOrhan Ayyüce takes a weekend drive through a vacant Vernon, in a short film for the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. citizen commented... View full entry
Obscene was the Venice Biennale of Rem Koolhass
On one side the fetishism of the industrial products and components (Italian International Pavilion) and on the other the celebration of the political failure of the world… as a naive agitprop able to wrap the architect with politically correct conscientiousness… self-complaisance for this comfortable dualism.
— new-territories.com
We are in the pursuit of the diagrammatic hoax he himself promoted 20 years ago, same arrogance of reductionism to avoid embracing and gathering complexity in a productive way, in an aesthetic way, for a critical production, not for a simulation of a critical behavior… sponsored by Rolex. View full entry
Ieoh Ming Pei, the now 97-year-old renowned Chinese-born American architect, was recently named the 2014 recipient of the prestigious International Union of Architects Gold Medal. The UIA Gold Medal honors an architect's life and work achievements in the course of more than 60 years and five continents in modern architecture history. — bustler.net
Best known as I.M. Pei, some of his most famous structures include the glass pyramid at the Louvre Museum in Paris, the National Museum of Art in Washington, the Johnson Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, to name a few.He has received other prestigious... View full entry
Not unlike his buildings—with their uncompromising linearity, precise use of natural light, and stark white facades—Richard Meier is a striking figure. In his signature round spectacles, a perfectly pressed suit, and with that recognizable shock of white hair, the Pritzker Prize-winning modernist invited filmmaker Barbara Anastacio on a tour of the newly opened Richard Meier Model Museum. — NOWNESS
Richard Meier’s Models on Nowness.com View full entry
Rem Koolhaas, curator of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, tells Jonathan Glancey why the uniformity of modern cities drives him up the wall — telegraph.co.uk
An exploded false ceiling and a lineup of lavatories become the stars as Koolhaas delves into the overlooked innards of today's buildings – and shows how architecture has become nothing more than cardboard — theguardian.com
Forty years after "Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles" another architect with the gaze of the foreigner takes us on a ride through the City of Angels, or as the Turkish architect Orhan Ayyüce likes to refer to it: "La Citta Capitalista". [...]
An ‘exclusive industrial town,’ Vernon borders on the cosmopolitan downtown of Los Angeles... Are alternative forms of housing, agriculture, and nature imaginable in a town that relies solely on industry and transport?
— IABR
Los Angeles architect Orhan Ayyüce takes a weekend drive through a vacant Vernon, in the following short film for the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. Submitted by the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design and run by Ayyüce, The Vernon City Project is being featured in... View full entry
The Fondation Cartier, the Paris-based contemporary art foundation, has abandoned plans to relocate from its central Paris premises [...].
In 2011, the president and founder of the Fondation Cartier, Alain Dominique Perrin, asked the French architect Jean Nouvel, to draw up preliminary plans for a new base on Ile Seguin. But Perrin tells The Art Newspaper that he has decided to enlarge the Fondation’s current premises in Boulevard Raspail, and will commission Nouvel to work on the expansion.
— theartnewspaper.com
Kahn was one of three founding members of IDEA Office, formerly the Central Office of Architecture. He originally opened the office in 1987 together with fellow architects Ron Golan and Russell N. Thomsen. In 2009, he renewed his long-standing partnership with Thomsen to form IDEA Office. Their work includes design at all scales, from graphic design to installations and industrial design, to architecture and urban planning — sciarc.edu
Sad news today from the SCI-Arc and LA architecture community. Eric Kahn, teacher and architect, has passed away at 58. Related: Y-House Showcase feature, by IDEA Office View full entry
As the 14th edition of the Venice Biennale of Architecture prepares to open, the pavilions of the Giardini might be the perfect venue for an analysis of the architectural manifestations of national identity. [...]
Architecture is a curious world in which the things we hate might look very similar, to a less-inured eye, to the things we love. It is a question of degrees, of finesse. Koolhaas exemplifies the paradox.
— ft.com
Daniel Friedman has been named the new UHM Dean of the School of Architecture, beginning August 1, 2014.
Friedman has served as Dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, and is currently a Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington. Prior to joining UW, he served as Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and as Director of the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati.
— hawaii.edu
It was an artistic collaboration delayed by some 25 years: The London architect Zaha Hadid responded as much to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles as she did to “Così Fan Tutte” when she designed her undulating all-white set for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s performance of Mozart’s opera this week (it closes on Saturday). “We were responding to the context, to Frank’s design,” Ms. Hadid said in a telephone interview from London. — nytimes.com
