Ask almost any of the local architects in this Mexican border town and they will tell you Tijuana has become a hotbed of building activity.
The growing demand for designer homes, they say, is being driven primarily by Tijuana natives returning to the city...
Most of the developments in Tijuana are for upper-middle-class families ... but the spare designs and basic building materials, especially concrete, used by Mr. Medina and others make it possible for more residents to have designed homes.
— nytimes.com
In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles.(Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect... View full entry
Workers are digging the foundation for a twin-towered apartment building that will obscure the great flying buttresses and stained-glass windows of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights.
Preservationists, neighbors and architects are justly up in arms. [...] Even the developer laments how the approval process for new buildings in New York spews out too many projects that nobody really likes.
— nytimes.com
After landing a $42,750 Innovation Fund grant from AIA for the project, the Vermont chapter purchased a 21-foot 1969 Airstream Globetrotter from a retired couple in central Vermont. Then it charged an undergraduate architecture class at Norwich University with redesigning and rebuilding its gutted interior.
The Archistream, as AIAVT has dubbed its mobile classroom, is now complete.
— sevendaysvt.com
Decades of socialism and military rule kept Myanmar — or Burma, as it was known — poor and isolated.
There was one upside, though. The economy was so lousy, there was no drive to demolish the big British colonial buildings in Yangon, Myanmar's largest city, and replace them with the glass and steel towers that now define much of the skylines in East Asia.
[...] remarkable architectural heritage, which has come into the cross hairs of developers trying to cash in on rising land prices.
— npr.org
The collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is inching closer to safety. The Michigan State Legislature agreed yesterday to contribute $350m over the next 20 years to protect the museum’s works of art and shore up Detroit’s ailing pension funds. The state’s governor Rick Snyder is expected to sign the bill, which is part of a package to help settle the city’s bankruptcy, by the end of the week. — theartnewspaper.com
Previously: Detroit Institute of Arts: $330 million pledged to save the city's art collection View full entry
The flagship museum of the billionaire financier and art collector Eli Broad, still under construction, has filed a $19.8 million lawsuit against a German company for what it describes as delays in fabricating the building blocks for its unusual latticed facade. — nytimes.com
The Fondation Cartier, the Paris-based contemporary art foundation, has abandoned plans to relocate from its central Paris premises [...].
In 2011, the president and founder of the Fondation Cartier, Alain Dominique Perrin, asked the French architect Jean Nouvel, to draw up preliminary plans for a new base on Ile Seguin. But Perrin tells The Art Newspaper that he has decided to enlarge the Fondation’s current premises in Boulevard Raspail, and will commission Nouvel to work on the expansion.
— theartnewspaper.com
Suzhou is like many Chinese cities. It has a historic core, including nine Unesco world heritage sites, as well as many beautiful gardens, waterways and temples. [...]
But Suzhou has also embarked on another fascinating project: urban mimicry. From Venetian-style “water town” districts to Dutch-style suburban living, Suzhou hosts what journalist Bianca Bosker calls “original copies”: simulations of western landmarks. The city is fast becoming China’s city of clones.
— theguardian.com
Previously:Colossal Bavarian Castle Set To Open In Dalian, ChinaChinese secretly copy Austrian town View full entry
Alex de Stampa makes tricky and delightful animations of famous contemporary structures, remixing the stale static-images circulated on architectural blogospheres. The animations are part of his "1 Week 1 Project", which you can read more about on Visual News.Mirador Building by MVRDV and Blanca... View full entry
In an effort to remediate a large patch of heavily contaminated soil in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, engineers managed to unleash a smell so pungent that, last week, owners of the site took a new tactic: a giant tent to contain it all. [...]
Though the 20,000-square-meter polyester tent contains an area roughly the size of three football fields and rises 36 meters near downtown, it only covers less than half of the contaminated area.
— motherboard.vice.com
Previously: Giant bubbles could be 'built over Beijing parks to save residents from smog danger' View full entry
The new library at Dalarna University, Dalarna Media Library, is now officially open to the public. The building that reinterprets the library in a multi functional design is laid out as an approximately 3.000 m2 ’spiral of knowledge’ that naturally integrates into the surrounding landscape at... View full entry
As a result of the violence, the local real estate market has bottomed out. Those who flee the city usually can’t sell their homes and businesses, so more and more buildings, including some of Tampico’s largest and most impressive ones, lie abandoned. Buildings that could easily survive for another century are mere empty shells, with huge trees growing through the roofs and out of the windows. Such levels of abandonment are rarely seen in the centre of a major city. — theguardian.com
The New York Public Library’s revised renovation plan — to upgrade the Mid-Manhattan Library and create more public space in its flagship Fifth Avenue building — is expected to cost about $300 million, according to library officials who outlined new details of the project in interviews. [...]
But officials, for the first time, revealed that the original plan, mostly scrapped last month in large part because of questions about the price tag, would actually have cost more than $500 million [...].
— nytimes.com
Previously View full entry
Daniel Libeskind is at it again with the recent unveiling and groundbreaking of Century Spire, a 60-story tower that will be built in the city of Makati in Manila, Philippines. Showrooms officially opened on May 28, and Libeskind joined Century Properties and Armani/Casa officials at the... View full entry