After a $91m, three-year renovation, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is due to reopen on Friday, 12 December.
[...] the firms Gluckman Mayner, Beyer Blinder Belle and Diller Scofidio + Renfro—moved the museum’s offices and research library, previously on the third floor, into the adjacent Miller-Fox townhouses, which had been used for storage. In the offices’ place, they built the Cooper Hewitt’s first open-plan galleries.
— theartnewspaper.com
Previously: Cooper-Hewitt Selects DS+R as Exhibition Designer and Local Projects as Media Designer View full entry
According to a press release issued last week by Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman & Associates, principal Gene Kaufman has submitted a proposal to buy the Orange County Government Center (Goshen, NY), which has been closed since 2011 due to storm damage. Designed in 1967 by Paul Rudolph, the building... View full entry
Ahead of a special Guardian Cities event, the renowned urban ‘rethinker’ says cities should be six or seven storeys high, Helsinki is on the verge of revolution, and that he’s sceptical of London’s cycle superhighway plans [...]
Practice partner Søholt puts forward one way of improving a city’s liveability: “Mix the city and assemble the people rather than dispersing them.”
— theguardian.com
Norway-based architecture firm Snøhetta will move its New York City offices to the Rudin family’s 80 Pine Street in the Financial District, the landlord announced this morning.
The architecture company, whose first New York City project was the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavillion at the World Trade Center site, will relocate from 25 Broadway to a segment of the 10th floor of the 38-story structure in 2015 [...].
— commercialobserver.com
[Jeanne Gang] had just come back from a trip on which she’d been using binoculars with Swarovski lenses and had become intrigued by the optical aspect of the crystal company’s output. She had also become interested in James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey, a long-term project that documents glacier shrinkage using time-lapse photography [...]
One challenge the studio faced was communicating the size of the glaciers photographed by Balog, and the extent of the devastation caused by global warming.
— designmiami.com
Beth Mosenthal penned an Op-Ed: Response to Michael Kimmelman's Critique of 1 WTC. She writes "I can only imagine the list of priorities that 1 World Trade entailed, but am still celebratory of the feat that it was realized despite perhaps the greatest obstacles any project could possibly... View full entry
William Byrd Callaway, one of the Bay Area’s most influential landscape architects, died Nov. 25 of cancer in San Francisco. He was 71. [...]
In 2007, by then the CEO of one of the profession’s largest firms, Mr. Callaway received the ASLA Medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects for accomplishments that included inspiring other designers “to retain an idealistic view of the profession and the world.”
— sfchronicle.com
The Sausalito-based landscape architect William Byrd Callaway is remembered for his prolific career with SWA Group, his varied landscape work from park to plazas, and his empathy, attentiveness and leadership.Growing up near Sacramento, Callaway received a bachelor's in landscape architecture... View full entry
And do you live with as much of the collection as you can?
Absolutely. I never keep fewer than five bronzes in my bedroom. It’s incredible that I have these things. I have them all round my bed—my little friends. I have very little money in the bank. I’m a hyper-materialist; enjoy it while you can. So many of my friends collect money in the way I collect art, but I don’t see the point.
— theartnewspaper.com
The architect, who implicitly exempted himself from that 98%, might have been arrogant, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right.
[...] many if not most buildings are the work of contractors, not architects, and that this has been and will likely always be the case. Unfortunately, architectural education and criticism tends to focus on important buildings at the expense of the common and ordinary.
— forbes.com
SelgasCano of Madrid will be designing the fifteenth Serpentine Galleries Pavilion in London's Kensington Gardens. For the past 15 years, the Serpentine Galleries has invited architects like Sou Fujimoto, Jean Nouvel, Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Wei Wei, Peter Zumthor, SANAA, Zaha Hadid, and most recently Smiljan Radic to design the temporary outdoor structure, which continues to be an anticipated summer event every year. — bustler.net
Like every year, the outdoor structure must be a flexible multi-functional social space with a cafe. SelgasCano have yet to submit their design plans.Here's a glimpse into some of their previous works:Plasencia Auditorium and Congress Centre, Cáseres, Spain 2005/2013Factory Mérida, Badajoz... View full entry
Introducing his Serpentine Pavilion in 2013, Sou Fujimoto described the structure as "between architecture and nature", suggesting an architectural form ethereal enough to change at any given moment, depending on perspective or approach, between the artificial and organic. That phrase has since... View full entry
Architect Yoshio Taniguchi and industrial designer Jasper Morrison are the recipients of the second annual Isamu Noguchi Award. The Isamu Noguchi Award recognizes individuals whose work represents the collaborative and multi-disciplinary qualities of landscape architect and artist Isamu Noguchi. Morrison and Taniguchi will be presented with the award by Motohide Yoshikawa (Ambassador of Japan to the U.N.) during a ceremony at The Noguchi Museum's Spring Benefit on May 19, 2015. — bustler.net
Learn more about the recipients on Bustler. View full entry
With the holiday season now officially upon us, the annual gift shopping panic has quickly picked up steam — and knowing how notoriously hard architects and designers are to shop for, doesn't make things any easier.One of our favorite gift ideas 'tis season are the adorable architectural toddler... View full entry
[...] British architect Sir David Chipperfield has said that he regards private investment’s hold over new architecture in London as an “absolutely terrible” means of building a city.
In Berlin, where he employs an office of 90, “there is still an idea of the public realm. We have given that up in London. We have declared the public realm dead; the question is how to get stuff out of the private sector. We are unbelievably sophisticated at that.”
— theguardian.com
Julia Ingalls reviews, the built work and paper architecture of Jimenez Lai. To wit "regardless of the medium...Understanding the role of storytelling within design is fundamental to all of Lai's work". jla-x commented "The most interesting drawing that he did was a series of plans of a space... View full entry