This post is brought to you by Ceramics of Italy Tile Competition *Update: Competition deadline has been extended to January 31st.* Confindustria Ceramica (the Italian Association of Ceramics) and the Italian Trade Agency have just announced the official call for entries for... View full entry
This post is brought to you by Cupa Pizarras Smart sustainability is not “just a fad” in contemporary architectural design — it's a lifelong necessity. Natural slate has proven to be a reliable exterior building material for its timeless appearance and its remarkable resistance... View full entry
An earthquake safety revolution is spreading along the streets and back alleys of Los Angeles, as steel frames and strong walls appear inside the first-story parking garages of thousands of apartment buildings.
The construction is designed to fix one of the most dangerous earthquake risks: Wood apartment buildings collapsing because the skinny poles propping up parking at the ground level are not strong enough to withstand the shaking.
— The Los Angeles Times
A building permit analysis conducted by The Los Angeles Times has found that over 27% of Los Angeles’s 11,400 "soft story" wood-frame apartments have been retrofitted since 2015 when the city passed an aggressive seismic upgrading ordinance. "Soft story" buildings are built with an... View full entry
With the completion of Hutong Bubble 218, MAD Architects made one step forward with their Beijing 2050 proposal, which they introduced during the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. The latest Hutong Bubble project features metallic “bubbles” embedded on the rooftop of a 305-square-meter... View full entry
I built a house around a house [using chain-link fence, corrugated metal, asphalt, and other common building materials]. It was the first completely free piece I did. I did it exactly the way I wanted. My client was me and my wife, and my wife egged me on. … I talked about the asphalt floor, and I was going to chicken out, and she said, “Come on, I want to see that.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
A recently published Los Angeles Review of Books interview conducted by Steven Jay Fogel and Mark Bruce Rosin with Frank Gehry in 1991 highlights a few fascinating tidbits of the architect's early life and his career pre-Bilbao. In the wide-ranging interview, Gehry discusses, among other... View full entry
Homes For All United States Representative Ilhan Omar has unveiled a new piece of legislation that seeks to reinvigorate public housing construction across the country by building 12 million new public and affordable housing units over the next decade. The so-called “Homes for All Act”... View full entry
Beijing's latest, hotly anticipated skyscraper opened to the public today: the Zaha Hadid Architects-designed Leeza SOHO tower already made a big splash in architectural media long before it was even finished with its 623-foot-tall, full-height atrium (the world's tallest) and spectacular... View full entry
Trahan Architects has unveiled renderings for a recently approved $450 million upgrade package for the historic Superdome football stadium in New Orleans. The Superdome, one of the few remaining Modernist football stadiums from the post-World War II era, was designed by local New Orleans... View full entry
The Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) New York office and developers Brookfield Properties and Park Tower Group have broken ground on a new 745-unit, dual tower complex on the Greenpoint waterfront in Brooklyn. Image courtesy of OMA/Bloom. The housing towers, rising to 300- and... View full entry
At a total investment of 24 billion yuan (S$4.65 billion), the 1.12 million square metre (sq m) Raffles City Chongqing is Singapore’s largest single development in China. In addition to the 235,000 sq m retail podium, the integrated development comprises the 201 unit Ascott Raffles City Chongqing serviced residence, 380 room InterContinental Raffles City Chongqing hotel, 150,000 sq m of Grade A office space and 1,400 luxury residential apartments. — The Business Times
After reaching structural completion only a few months ago, the Safdie Architects-designed $3.4 billion Raffles City Chongqing megadevelopment recently celebrated its phased opening. An earlier September soft opening of the enormous five-story shopping mall reportedly attracted a whopping... View full entry
According to a recently published report from Dodge Data & Analytics, a broadly based slowdown in the construction industry registered an 11% drop in construction starts for the month of October. The report finds that the American economy generated $696.3 billion in construction... View full entry
Across Los Angeles, architects and developers are embracing factory-built multi-family housing construction across a variety of projects. A selection of recently proposed and currently under construction efforts highlight the fact that while previously limited mostly to single-family projects... View full entry
A 6,000-unit residential development designed by Revery Architecture has been proposed by the Squamish First Nation for 12 acres of tribal lands located in the Vancouver area. Because the development is being proposed for land that falls solely under the jurisdiction of... View full entry
The Arts District Soho Warehouse mixed-use development designed by Studio One Eleven in Los Angeles has won formal approval from the Los Angeles City Planning Commission. THe project, developed by real estate investment firm Jade Enterprises will bring 110 live/work apartments... View full entry
The budget committee of Germany’s lower house of parliament yesterday approved additional funding for Berlin’s planned Museum of the 20th Century, designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, after estimates for the construction costs spiralled to €364m from €200m. — The Art Newspaper
According to The Art Newspaper, the new Herzog & de Meuron-designed museum in Berlin's central Kulturforum arts district is needed because "the Neue Nationalgalerie can only display about a quarter of Berlin’s vast stores of 20th-century art at any given time." Current situation at the planned... View full entry