Humility is a virtue. That’s the obvious lesson, but doing anything, even constructing a few self-effacing buildings at Ronchamp, is a big deal. Mr. Piano solved the riddle of adding to a site without appearing conspicuously to do so by burrowing into the brow of the hill, below the chapel, and inserting the convent and visitors’ center into the cuts, half buried, with zinc-and-glass facades to let in light. — NYT
Michael Kimmelman recently visited Ronchamp, France the site of Le Corbusier’s hilltop chapel Notre Dame du Haut and Renzo Piano Building Workshop's recent addition to the of a new convent and new visitors’ center. He believes that the new addition is a humble, quiet addition to the... View full entry
The work of Spanish architect Julio Salcedo is shown in this book as a series of built and speculative projects. Salcedo's houses, early achievements that stunned both academic and professional circles with their freshness and precocious sophistication are presented with unpublished competition... View full entry
The rural as a strict counterpart to the urban appears to be a condition of the past. — http://www.monu-magazine.com/news.htm
The rural as a strict counterpart to the urban appears to be a condition of the past. At least, this is what Kees Christiaanse posits in an interview with us entitled "The New Rural: Global Agriculture, Desakotas, and Freak Farms". He points out that, today, non-urban spaces interact so... View full entry
The Trust for the National Mall exhibited the final design concepts of the National Mall Design Competition last week....Orhan Ayyüce, argued "It is really deplorable when all the renderings are depicting entertained crowds and happy go around shopping mall like experiences. The National Mall is much more meaningful when it houses 'people' voicing something in masses.
Terri Peters offered up a report from SmartGeometry 2012 in Troy, New York. SmartGeometry is an international community of academics and professionals who hold annual workshops and conference days at academic institutions around the world and the theme for this year (it’s ninth)... View full entry
Archinect and Woodbury School of Architecture are proud to present: Publish Or... bracket [GOES SOFT] Thursday, April 19 6:00 p.m. Sonic landscape by Health and Beauty. WUHO Gallery 6518 Hollywood Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90028 (map) Come say hello, mingle, and check out selected entries from... View full entry
"Right now we are making deeply diffuse hovering, clouds of material that work together in very delicate ways but when we compress those all together we can see those working as roofs, walls that breathe, that filter light" says Philip Beesly a Professor of Architecture at Waterloo University — BBC News
The buildings in our cities could quite literally come alive in the decades ahead. Spencer Kelly looks at a series of projects that will allow buildings and even the furniture in them to be able to sense how they are being used and adapt to changes in the environment around them. View full entry
Four finalists have emerged from the Menil Collection's extensive international search to select an architect to design its Menil Drawing Institute (MDI), the first major project to be built as a part of the museum's long-range master plan. — houston.culturemap.com
After several years of site visits, careful research and thoughtful interviews, the Menil's architecture selection committee has announced a short list of long-established and newly-emerging architectural firms: Tatiana Bilbao — up-and-coming Mexico City architect with a number of... View full entry
Built for Swire Properties Ltd. (962), the structure cost HK$27,000 ($3,477) per square foot to construct, including land premium. A standard high-rise apartment in the city can cost as little as $HK4,000 per square foot to build, according to Swire Chief Executive Officer Martin Cubbon.
“Of course, it’s going to be enormously expensive by any standards,” says Cubbon. “In rental values and capital values, it’s going to command the highest numbers that Hong Kong has ever seen.”
— businessweek.com
Check out the live stream of the discussion between Paul Goldberger and Frank Gehry at Yale. View full entry
Medellín has turned itself into a model Latin American city, with good transport, dynamic public spaces, new schools and a culture of civic architecture. The real design project, however, was one of social organisation, with a section of society grouping together and deciding to rewrite their city's story. — Guardian
Justin McGuirk analyzes the "social urbanism" of Medellín's "self-consciously iconic" architecture. Efforts by politicians such as Sergio Fajardo and architects like Giancarlo Mazzanti to focus on public space and civic architecture, were he finds part of a larger program of... View full entry
"In 1955, the US State Department commissioned Richard Neutra to design a new embassy in Karachi. Neutra's appointment was part of an ambitious program of architectural commissions to renowned architects, which included embassies by Walter Gropius in Athens, Edward Durrell Stone in New Delhi... View full entry
Because towers take so long to plan and construct, the current crop reflect a vision up to a decade old, reckons Nick Offer of Arup, an engineering firm. Economic conditions and the scale of such projects mean that only the very brave will invest now... In 2010 the coalition scrapped the previous, Labour government’s density targets, which were designed to encourage developers to build more units. Instead it has endorsed “garden cities” — economist.com
Related: Just climbing the shard, whatever... View full entry
The story of the automobile — like the story of the city of Detroit — is a tale of unwitting eternal returns. At every turn the inventors of modern life — of its machines, its aspirations — seemed unable or unwilling to grasp the meaning of what they were in the process of creating and unleashing, and what they were thus undoing and destroying. — Places Journal
On Places, historian Jerry Herron traces the intersecting lives of architect Albert Kahn, industrialist Edsel Ford, and artist Diego Rivera and examines their roles in shaping the mythology of Detroit as an industrial powerhouse. View full entry
Before a city becomes a thing of steel, concrete, and glass it is a theater of visions in conflict. As a city ages, the visions do not die but come up against the physical and ideological resistance of the place and its people. This is an account of a Manhattan that could have been – might have been. A phantasmagorical Manhattan where the visionary meets the everyday. The island as we know it is but a pale reflection of a city designed by visionaries – a city of mad, incongruous utopias.
The film (created for Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale) visualizes several unrealized projects for Manhattan, including Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Midtown, Rem Koolhaas’ City of the Captive Globe, RUR’s East River Corridor, Paul Rudolph’s Eastside... View full entry
It is still far and away the greatest memorial of modern times—the most beautiful, the most heart-wrenching, the most subtle, and the most powerful. It’s also the most abstract, which makes it even more miraculous that it was built in a nation that generally prefers symbols more along the lines of the Lincoln Memorial. — Vanity Fair
Reacting to the news that The New Yorker's influential architecture critic Paul Goldberger, was moving to another magazine (although both are owned by Condé Nast) Vanity Fair, some have wondered whether Eulogies For Architecture Criticism (are) Not Far Behind... View full entry