Though many scholars focusing on penitentiaries suspect that staff-prisoner relations are molded by institutional architecture, little empirical work has been completed on the topic. Now, a new study led by Beijersbergen and published in Crime & Delinquency has concluded that building styles, floor plans, and other design features do indeed have a significant impact on the way Dutch prisoners perceive their relationships with prison staff. — psmag.com
Due to plummeting enrollment and a troubled district, vacant school buildings—heck, just vacant buildings—are none too rare in Detroit. After 19 years of abandonment, the Nellie Leland School, however, is no longer vacant—it, as abandoned urban buildings are want to do, is back in session as condos. [...]
Today, the school is known as Leland Lofts, a set of expansive condos in the Lafayette Park neighborhood near downtown Detroit, where a 1,465-square-foot, one-bedroom loft goes for $175K.
— curbed.com
Work is already underway in Bel Air on a megacompound that will include the largest single-family house in the US. The enormous project, at the dead-end of Airole Way above the Bel-Air Hotel, comes from megamansion developer Nile Niami, and is slated to total 85,000 square feet with a 70,000-square-foot main house. [...]
The [Los Angeles Business Journal] guesses America's newest mega-megamansion will be listed "in the $150 million-plus range."
— la.curbed.com
The Wall Street Journal calls this "Fighting Urban Blight With Art". Liz Thomas, the curator of the project, calls it "an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurtle through every day".
The project is not actually fighting blight, of course - only the ability of Amtrak customers to see it.
— Al Jazeera
Reminds me of NYC in the 1980's when the city put large vinyl decals depicting shutters, potted plants, Venetian blinds and window shades over the yawning windows of abandoned city-owned buildings that face the Cross Bronx Expressway. View full entry
Downtown Los Angeles’s historic core is about to get its first major museum, if that’s what you want to call it. Local developer Tom Gilmore and architect Tom Wiscombe are teaming up on the complex project, which they are calling the Old Bank District Museum. It will be dedicated to contemporary Los Angeles art and located in the sub-basements, basements, ground floors, mezzanines, and roofs of three interconnected buildings along Main and Fourth streets. — archpaper.com
Brutalism, a muscular and monumental architectural style known for its unsparing use of cast concrete, has grown old enough since its heyday in the fifties, sixties, and seventies to have aged badly, but not old enough to inspire much sympathy. The austere, domineering artifacts of its philosophies now face widespread enmity; a number of institutions, with varying degrees of exertion, have sought in recent years to replace their Brutalist inheritances with practically anything else. — theawl.com
THANKS TO preservation efforts and the museum-building boom of the past decade, America's hot zone for modern and contemporary architecture is still the Midwest. And driving is the best way to see it all, including the star attraction, Chicago. "It's the birthplace of tall buildings," said Zoë Ryan, an architecture and design curator at the Art Institute of Chicago — online.wsj.com
A $700,000 home was teetering over the edge of Texas' Lake Whitney — until officials set it on fire.
The home, which had been gradually crumbling into the lake for weeks, was set on fire shortly after 10 a.m. local time after authorities deemed it the safest and cheapest option. Officials had considered pulling the home closer to land using a giant net — deemed unsafe — or letting it fall into the lake on its own — too expensive to clean up.
— mashable.com
Some people might mentally retch that the United Nations, believing the world's population could hit 9 billion by 2050, thinks we should prepare to eat bugs.
Not the folks at Sweden's Belatchew Arkitekter, though: They want to fast-track the insect-munching. Thus they've whipped up plans to build "vermin farms" upon Stockholm's major intersections, so that by 2018 everybody in the city will be guaranteed plentiful rations of six-legged foodstuffs.
— citylab.com
On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin.
“Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement.
— politics.suntimes.com
Trump responds in his typical classy style... Before I bought the site, the Sun Times had the biggest, ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen. Mine is magnificent and popular. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2014 View full entry
KCRW, the NPR-affiliated public radio darling of Southern California, broke ground yesterday on its new 35,000 square-foot Media Center, located on Santa Monica College's Academy of Entertainment & Technology campus. For the past thirty years, KCRW was run out of a basement underneath the... View full entry
In the latest Hong Kong Institute of Architects (HKIA) Annual Awards, Aedas was no doubt victorious once again with two preservation/renewal projects: "Art Community": Revitalisation Project in Wan Chai, Hong Kong and Center 66 in Wuxi, China. As the highest architectural awards program in Hong Kong, the HKIA Awards recognizes outstanding architecture designed by HKIA members. — bustler.net
Aedas once again won the highest honor, Medal of the Year, in addition to the Special Architectural Award in Heritage + Adaptive Reuse for the Revitalisation Project.Here's a glimpse of the project, which preserved and revived an early 20th-century shophouse building into a public space for arts... View full entry
In land-scarce Singapore greenery too is going sky-ward, with a 24-storey condominium earning a Guinness record for boasting the world’s largest vertical garden.
Tree House condominium, completed in 2013 by property firm City Developments Limited, has covered its façade in nearly 2,300 square meters of greenery. [...]
The condo uses the plants as natural insulation to help filter pollution, absorb heat and reduce the amount of energy needed to cool individual units.
— blogs.wsj.com
Not unlike his buildings—with their uncompromising linearity, precise use of natural light, and stark white facades—Richard Meier is a striking figure. In his signature round spectacles, a perfectly pressed suit, and with that recognizable shock of white hair, the Pritzker Prize-winning modernist invited filmmaker Barbara Anastacio on a tour of the newly opened Richard Meier Model Museum. — NOWNESS
Richard Meier’s Models on Nowness.com View full entry
The University of California, Santa Cruz recently selected notable New York firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects to design the university's new Institute of the Arts and Sciences. Competition was tough indeed, as TWBTA was one of three finalists that included Allied Works Architecture and... View full entry