When an architect talks about “transparency,” as Sou Fujimoto did during his well-attended lecture at UCLA’s Decafe at Perloff Hall on Friday, it’s always a relief when it refers to more than a literal degree of opacity. Presenting nine of his projects in a lecture than ran ten minutes... View full entry
"Here is a nice excursion into the early days of the discussion on facades and how to avoid them. Wish I had seen it in real, and at the time. " - via Karen LohrmannSome excerpts from the conversation between Rem Koolhaas, Stefano de Martino and Léa-Catherine Szacka discussing post modernism... View full entry
The Van Alen Institute and online auction platform Paddle8 recently opened up their 2015 Auction of Art + Design Experiences that lets eager (and wealthy) bidders opt for basically hanging out with some of today's famous architects and designers.This year's auction boasts an international list of... View full entry
Pritzker Prize Laureate Shigeru Ban has announced plans to contribute to emergency relief efforts in Nepal after the April 25 earthquake reduced cities to rubble, killed more than 7,000, and left thousands homeless. In the short term, Ban’s firm and his relief organization Voluntary Architects’ Network (VAN) will distribute simple tents—supplemented with plastic sheets donated by contractors to serve as wall partitions—and assemble them onsite as temporary shelter and medical aid stations. — archrecord.construction.com
According to the report, VAN aims to partner with local universities, students and architects in the coming months to work towards create stable housing once conditions have stabilized. This is not the first time that Shigeru Ban, who won the 2014 Pritzker prize, has deployed his architectural... View full entry
Over 300 guests gathered at New York's Metropolitan Club for the Architectural League of New York's 2015 President's Medal dinner to honor medal recipient Henry N. Cobb, a founding partner at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.Bestowed by the League's President and Board of Directors as the... View full entry
Renzo Piano's versatility continues to win the hearts of NYC developers, and it looks like the starchitect is finally getting his chance to flex his muscle in the residential realm. Piano—who just cut the ribbon to the new Whitney to rave reviews—has been chosen by Michael Shvo and Bizzi & Partners to design a brand new 290-foot tower at 100 Varick Street in up-and-coming Hudson Square bordering Soho. — 6sqft.com
The tower will be Piano's first large-scale residential project in the U.S. View full entry
Nicholas Korody profiled GRNASFCK, an experimental landscape studio. Therein they explained "We travel to places of material action, geologically leaky locations, where the evidence of disturbance, but also creation, is evident...While we see our narratives as a version of a field report, it... View full entry
Today it houses one of London’s best permanent collection displays, but the 1991 Sainsbury Wing extension to the National Gallery in London was almost scuppered when Prince Charles and the other trustees opposed the architect of the new building, Robert Venturi.
The row was over a false Corinthian column that the US architect wanted as a decorative feature on the Trafalgar Square façade of the new extension.
— The Art Newspaper
This modernist villa on the Côte d’Azur, designed by Irish architect Eileen Gray, has witnessed wartime shootings, murder and vandalism by Le Corbusier. Now, at last, it has been brought back to life [...]
Le Corbusier visited and, apparently outraged that a woman could have made such a significant work in a style he considered his own, assaulted it with a series of garish and ugly wall paintings, which he chose to execute completely naked.
— theguardian.com
We need to talk! We at MONU think that the time has come to talk with you about "participation" in architecture and urbanism and re-evaluate and re-examine developments around this topic in recent years and what the future might hold.
(Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, May 2015)
— http://www.monu-magazine.com/news.htm
We need to talk! We at MONU think that the time has come to talk with you about "participation" in architecture and urbanism and re-evaluate and re-examine developments around this topic in recent years and what the future might hold. Our 11th issue on the topic of "Clean Urbanism", around 6 years... View full entry
The exhibition recalls an earlier era when architects there believed that social challenges should be tackled by design, that humane societies deserved beautiful new forms, and progressive development put faith in art, nature and the resilience of ordinary people. — Michael Kimmelman, New York Times
Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times wrote a review on the recent MoMA exhibit, ‘Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980’. The exhibit highlights the work of Oscar Niemeyer, Lina Bo Bardi, Eladio Dieste, Rogelio Salmona and others who helped define Latin American modern... View full entry
The Pompidou Centre in Paris has hit back at critics who say its Le Corbusier exhibition, which opened to the public yesterday, 29 April, glosses over recent accusations that the Swiss-born French architect was a militant fascist with links to the Vichy regime.
A spokeswoman for the Pompidou says the exhibition does not refer to Le Corbusier’s fascist past because “it’s about the proportions of the human body, which are present in his architecture and painting. [...]”
— The Art Newspaper
Previously: Le Corbusier "militant fascist" claims overshadow 50th death anniversary View full entry
In over 140 years of making glass, [...] Corning Inc. has also established a reputation for commissioning first-rate works of architecture at its home base in this small city in the Finger Lakes region of New York. [...]
And now there’s a Contemporary Art + Design Wing by Thomas Phifer and Partners. Mr. Phifer is a New York architect whose intensely crafted minimalist sensibility comes as close as any American architect has to a Japanese aesthetic.
— wsj.com
Previously: An (almost seamless) Glass Museum View full entry
On the occasion of winning Harrison's 2015 BritWeek Design Icon Award, Thomas Heatherwick spoke with the furniture designer about his work and visions for his firm's future. We've selected a few highlights from Heatherwick's interview below:Harrison: Your staggering body of work has spanned the... View full entry
Senior editor Orhan Ayyüce published the first in a series of mini-interviews for a new feature Touching Base: In which he profiled Volkan Alkanoglu, founding principal of Volkan Alkanoglu | DESIGN LLC. It was a reminder for Donna Sink of how small the world is, as her "husband's company... View full entry