GLENN Murcutt, Australia's most internationally recognised architect, famous for the expression ''touching the ground lightly'', won't be able to get his hands near the competition to design a new Australian Pavilion in Venice. — smh.com.au
Will Alsop has announced he is leaving international architecture firm RMJM to form a new practice. The new company, established with fellow RMJM principal Scott Lawrie and covering architecture, masterplanning, interiors, landscape, product and graphic design, involves a number of other staff who worked at Alsop’s division within the firm. — building.co.uk
Orhan Ayyüce comments "as simple as it is, one of the most beautiful houses i have seen in this age of dwell magazine and ikea type of joint business deals which tend to glorify form and materiality to boredom.."
Archinect's newest Showcase features the House in Geumsan. The project is located in South Korea and designed by Hyungnam Lim, Eunjoo Roh + studio_GAON. With the project the designers tried to highlight the element of Korean architecture that distinguishes it from Japanese or Chinese... View full entry
Bowing to community pressure, the owners of Richard Neutra's Kronish House in Beverly Hills have agreed to postpone its demolition until at least Oct. 10 to give preservationists a chance to devise a plan to save the residence.
In a related and groundbreaking action, the Beverly Hills City Council early Wednesday asked the community's Planning Commission to devise a historic-preservation ordinance.
— L.A. Times
Previously. View full entry
Zurich Esposito, Executive Director of AIA Chicago, added that, “Doug was a shooting star and always ahead of most. We are only just now starting to understand everything he was moving forward in design. His recent absence from the practice was palpable. His death is a huge loss for our community.” — archpaper.com
Team NJ — as the group of architecture, planning and engineering students from NJIT and Rutgers — has built a futuristic-looking, one-story house, using modular, precast-concrete, construction, as their entry for the 2011 Solar Decathlon.
News Barry Lehrman shared the news that Leonard Parker FAIA, founder of one of Minneapolis's most significant architecture practices and a well-loved professor at the University of Minnesota, has passed away at after a long illness at 88. He also posted an excerpt from an 1986 Star Tribune... View full entry
Overall nonresidential construction is expected to decline by 5.6 percent — Business First
Reuters reports that the U.S. economy stumbled badly in the first half of this year and came dangerously close to contracting in the January-March period. Also, Market Watch suggests Friday’s report on the pace of economic growth may be so weak as to spur talk of stagflation... View full entry
The Metropol Parasol is arguably the most important structure to open this year, and it has without doubt come to be one of the most photographed new architectural works of 2011. — Inhabitat
Designed by German architect Juergen Mayer, it has quickly become a new focal point for the city of Seville, Spain. Throwing back to the city's marketplace tradition, and paving the way for a new era of design innovation, the Metropol Parasol is a signal moment in architectural culture. Recently... View full entry
Archinect is working hard to connect hiring firms with job seekers. In tumultuous economic times, it may become hard for a firm that seeks to employ new talent to find the right match among hundreds of received applications. That is why we recently launched a brand new service for job advertisers... View full entry
The resolutions required a tower of similar design proportions. How much the new design resembles the old one, just shorter, is not immediately clear. Initially, Hines said it had filed no new plans, but when The Observer pointed to a notice on the City Planning website, spokesman George Lancaster admitted that the project was back on and imminent. “We DID file revised plans with City Planning for the shorter tower adjacent to MoMA,” he wrote in an email. — Observer
So is this good news or bad news? They said they couldn't do a shorter tower, and if it has to be the same thing, just shorter or with 200 feet lopped off the top, can that really be a satisfactory solution? Then again, if it's even half as good as 100 11th, it'll be better than most of the dreck... View full entry
Last week the architect Rafael Viñoly was speaking—not kindly—about colleagues of his who think they can do things besides make buildings. “This is a profession,” he said dryly, “that generates an enormous amount of arrogance.” — observer.com
“Architects feel empowered to give opinions about politics and sociology and philosophy without knowing much about it,” Mr. Viñoly said by phone from Beijing, where his firm is building an engineering school. “Kind of in the same way that they think they can design... View full entry
He may be a Canadian of Jewish extraction, but The Observer always figured Frank Gehry was part Irish. How else to explain his golden touch? — Observer
ESTO photographer David Sundberg captures an unusual shot off the coast of Manhattan—a Frank Gehry rainbow. See if you can guess what the two pots of gold are. View full entry
Modernism is about space, post modernism is about communication, you should do what turns you on" - Robert Venturi — youtube
After saying, "my understanding of post modernism was pretty shallow," film maker John Thornton, a.k.a Rusty Scupperton, finds out what Robert Venturi is all about in this 2 parts video. View full entry
Leonard Parker FAIA, founder of one of Minneapolis's most significant architecture practices and a well-loved professor at the University of Minnesota, has passed away at after a long illness at 88. A disciple of Eero Saarinen, Leonard worked on the St. Louis Gateway Arch and Christ Church... View full entry
Admittedly, commercial real estate signs are not a particularly literary sort of fiction, but this sub-genre does have its own traditions and mores. Its practitioners exercise what we might consider a tentative form of realism: After all, their stories should be plausible enough to, ideally, attract capital. Thus certain rules and strictures — relating to commercial potential, practical materials and the laws of physics — must be observed. — Places
Rob Walker, the man behind the now defunct "Consumed" column for the New York Times Magazine and one of the founders of the Hypothetical Development Organization, reviews the history of architecture fiction over at Places-Design Observer. The piece titled Implausible Futures for Unpopular Places... View full entry
