For an architect, in the instant that he has undivided attention of a patron with the power to realize his designs, literally nothing else matters; not a fire alarm, not even an earthquake; there is nothing else to talk about but architecture. -Dejan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex The fully... View full entry
BIG in collaboration with TENU, Julie Hardenberg and Inuk Silas Høgh present Connecting Greenland: AIR+PORT as a part of the exhibition “POSSIBLE GREENLAND” at the Danish Biennale di Venezia Pavilion, exploring the potentials and challenges that Greenland is facing as the country gains global attention. — bustler.net
Click here to see more Archinect News posts related to the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. View full entry
The architecture billings index rose 2.8 points to 48.7 last month, the highest since March, the American Institute of Architects said on Wednesday. The billings index, which measures demand for architects' services, helps predict construction activity nine to 12 months ahead. Any measure below 50 indicates a decline in billings. — reuters.com
It’s hard to know whether you regard this as nightmare or opportunity, I tell him. “That has been my entire life story,” Koolhaas said, “Running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated. The acceptance of certain realities doesn’t preclude idealism. It can lead to certain breakthroughs. — Smithsonian magazine, September 2012
Some classic Nicolai Ouroussoff-piece - so expect an up-and-too-close-personal portrait, explicit hints of retro-active admiration, generic and gullible phrasing, all-over-the-place platitudes and creepy catchphrases - on Rem Koolhaas. Worth a read, but only for the quotes. For those that do not... View full entry
While the park began as a grass-roots endeavor — albeit a well-heeled one — it quickly became a tool for the Bloomberg administration’s creation of a new, upscale, corporatized stretch along the West Side. — NYT
Jeremiah Moss ( the pen name of the author of the blog Vanishing New York) penned an editorial on the High Line. Therein he argues the High Line "has become a tourist-clogged catwalk and a catalyst for some of the most rapid gentrification in the city’s history". View full entry
Rumor has it that Pritzker Prize–winning French architect Jean Nouvel has been selected to design a mammoth new building for the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), renowned for its exhibitions of 20th-century and contemporary Chinese art, in Beijing. If reports prove to be true, Nouvel will not only have the distinguished honor of executing this highly coveted commission, but also to win bragging rights for outgunning his blockbuster contemporaries, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid... — jingdaily.com
UPDATE: Jean Nouvel Confirmed as Winner of the National Art Museum of China Competition View full entry
Reacting to Tatzu Nishi’s concept for Discovering Columbus, Donna Sink exclaimed "Wow, I love the interior environments he makes for these installations! The existing piece is so out-of-place." The conceptual piece will consist a living room six stories up in the air wrapped around the historic statue of Christopher Columbus found in Columbus Circle, NYC.
In the latest edition of the UpStarts: feature FreelandBuck aka David Freeland and Brennan Buck (an architectural design practice based in New York and Los Angeles affiliated with Yale School of Architecture, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC) and Woodbury University, ed. wow... View full entry
Ratner & Co. believe Brooklyn as a whole is already well on its way to super-premium status and will never go back. They believe Ratner has built exactly the sort of architectural showpiece and modern sports-and-entertainment megaplex that the newly gentrified Brooklynites want. — New York Magazine
Will Leitch asks now that the fighting is over and Bruce Ratner’s Barclays Center is almost completed, will the crowds come? Additionally, Aaron Plewke recently snapped some photos of the building under construction. View full entry
For a Middle East-based client he's not allowed to identify, Johnson worked on a project back in the late 2000s designing a building that would have been a mile-and-a-half tall, with 500 stories. Somewhat of a theoretical practice, the design team identified between 8 and 10 inventions that would have had to take place to build a building that tall. Not innovations, Johnson says, but inventions, as in completely new technologies and materials. — theatlanticcities.com
LIGHT HOUSES: ON THE NORDIC COMMON GROUND FINLAND, NORWAY AND SWEDEN, NORDIC PAVILION “COMMON GROUND” 13. MOSTRA INTERNAZIONALE DI ARCHITETTURA LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA, 29 AUGUST – 25 NOVEMBER, 2012 The exhibition celebrates the jubilee of the Nordic Pavilion designed fifty years... View full entry
In 1954, a young Hungarian went to work with Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. As his then colleague, Cesar Pelli, describes him: “[He] was a small sensation: he had a fur-trimmed coat, a homburg, and a Van Dyke beard.”... He had been a distinguished architectural student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in Paris, and a draftsman under Le Corbusier... he was quickly tapped as the in-house photographer, creating pictures that became indelible symbols of the Mad Men age of Modernism. — fastcodesign.com
Urbanism is one of those malleable concepts that defy definition. A flexible subject where, by trying to lock it within a specific scope, its validity sometimes gets undermined and its potential spoiled. But when a magazine develops and maintains its own way to portray the multiple faces, forms... View full entry
Artinfo spoke with Cathy Lang Ho curator of "Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good" the American Pavilion's inherently political theme at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. 18x32 opined "Go reread The Society of the Spectacle, get back to me with a new headline.—ed." The link is to a wikipedia entry on Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
News Wiel Arets it was announced, has been named Dean of Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture. lletdownl wrote in response to the news "This news had been floating around, and i had my fingers crossed. Though i know almost nothing about how good a job Arets will be able... View full entry
Ai Weiwei: No. Beijing's greatest problem is that it never belongs to its people. Though it's a city of more than 10 million, people living here are like people living in a hotel. — Foreign Policy
Beijing's best-known dissident, architect, and creative provocateur tells Jonathan Landreth what's wrong with China's frenetic capital. View full entry
Alan Balfour, dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture since 2008, has announced his intention not to seek reappointment to that position. Balfour will return to the Georgia Tech faculty as a professor in the School of Architecture upon concluding his tenure as dean, effective June 30, 2013. — gatech.edu
