"Personally when I did the project of the Art Museum in São Paulo my basic concern was to make an ugly architecture...A poor architecture with free spaces that could be created by the collective...Most people find that the museum is poor, and it is. I wanted to make a poor project. That is, formally and architecturally ugly, but that would be a usable space, that would be something that could be taken over by men". - Lina Bo Bardi — Cosmopista
A recent opinion piece in O Estado de S.Paulo proposed fencing in the wonderful open plaza of Lina Bo Bardi's MASP, as one solution for addressing concerns that the space is becoming a mini cracolândia. This situation it is argued has negatively impacted the MASP and it's cultural prestige... View full entry
Later it was the stamping ground of the 19th century’s version of today’s “starchitects,” including Andrew Jackson Downing and his disciples, like Calvert Vaux and Frederick Clarke Withers. Their work — grand Second Empire Victorian, Gothic revival and Queen Anne houses — is everywhere — NYT
Lisa Selin Davis profiles the town of Newburgh NY, which has grand but neglected architecture and is reminiscent of 1980s Brooklyn, before gentrification. The community is working to revitalize the troubled city and it's architecture. However, some doubt whether the recent influx of artists/new... View full entry
"The building, designed to be the New York City Pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair, is a long, barrel-vaulted shed, with austere colonnades on both long sides and a few luxury touches, like the limestone and the scalloping on the columns. It was never a wonderful building, but it troubles me that the shorthand for a renovation is to slap a layer of glass on the side facing the road and call it new". - Justin Davidson — NY Magazine
Recently art critic Jerry Saltz and architecture critic Justin Davidson toured the updated building and new expansion, designed by Grimshaw Architects. View full entry
Candy Chan has done us all a solid -- the "architect-to-be" made an info-graphic that splits up the topics covered by two of the most popular A.R.E. test-prep books, Kaplan and Ballast (PPI). (Continued from Part I, ARE 4.0 contents) ARE 4.0 Reading The ARE seems to be such a mystery to a... View full entry
"designed by famed architect Zaha Hadid whose signature style appears to be making some of the world's most f**kable buildings...like Georgia O'Keeffe of things you can walk inside...i guess maybe it is time things evened out a bit" - Jon Stewart — Daily Show
Last night on The Daily Show, they offered a critique of Qatar's recently released plans for the Al Wakrah 2022 FIFA World Cup Stadium, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. The show goes on to label the proposal one of the world's most f**kable soccer stadiums. Also while reporting in, on... View full entry
Last week Alex Calderwood, cofounder and creative force behind the Ace Hotel, was found dead. He was 47. The first Ace Hotel opened in Seattle in 1999, under Calderwood's direction... When Calderwood and his team took the company east, to New York, Calderwood brought his friends, design duo Roman & Williams, on board to design the space. Here, Robin Standefer of Roman & Williams remembers Calderwood's design legacy. — fastcodesign.com
Like one skyline perched on another, the latest mega-building by Rem Koolhaas towers over the starchitect playground of Rotterdam. But why was it even built? — theguardian.com
CalArts two-day symposium on “The Politics of Parametricism” opened last Friday with a conversation between Reinhold Martin, associate professor at Columbia University’s GSAPP, and Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects. Their debate, while at times tending more... View full entry
The latest edition of Showcase; featured a complete redesign of the Law Faculties and Central Administration Buildings at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), by CRAB Studio. NewsWith Architecture for Humanity's experience helping communities beyond the relief phase of disaster... View full entry
A new book, “The Houses of Louis Kahn” (Yale University Press, $65), provides an architectural bridge between the personal and the professional stories, focusing on the nine houses Kahn completed, and designs for two dozen more. The story told by the authors, George H. Marcus and William Whitaker, is one of warm client relations, attention to the smallest domestic detail and a philosophical search for the best arrangement of rooms to call home. — nytimes.com
One of Los Angeles’ most sly urban characteristics is its sprawl: by being so large, its widely cast net defies characterization while also incubating remarkable experimentations. A few outstanding selections from that mélange are the members of Out There Doing It -- a collection of... View full entry
New tumblr blog that looks at "outrageously gender-imbalanced lecture series, etc." send observed inequalities to feministwall at gmail dot com. — feministwall.tumblr.com
The Cathedral Group's A Dolls' House raised close to £90,000 at the end of the live auction event on Nov. 11 at Bonhams in London. The project invited 20 well-known UK architects, who collaborated with artists and other designers, to create their own doll houses with the goal to raise... View full entry
Beth Rosenthal penned an Op-Ed - Millennials and Opportunity: Embracing Intentional vs Spontaneous Change in the Workforce. In the piece she puts a challenge/question to her contemporaries; "What if rather than changing jobs or companies, you tried to change the system or culture... View full entry
Lina Bo Bardi was loyal more to an emancipating concept of modernity than to the abstract, formal language of modern architecture. Her thinking and practice were situated at the intersection of different worldviews: north and south, city and hinterland, privilege and deprivation, modernism and tradition, past and present, abstraction and social realism. As she declared in 1989, “I didn’t make myself alone. I am curious and this quality broadens my horizons. ... I am somehow special.” — Places Journal
Lina Bo Bardi's career spanned two continents and six decades, but we are only just beginning to appreciate what Zeuler Lima describes as the "vast and original body of work that emerged from her prolific but discontinuous trajectory as architect, designer, illustrator, writer, editor and... View full entry