It’s an eye-opening experience. I have lived in New York for more than 30 years. I have crossed the harbor on the Staten Island Ferry more than once and crossed the big-name bridges hundreds of times. But great swaths of the city remain as unknown to me as Patagonia. The architecture cruise helped fix that. — NYT
William Grimes reports back from a recent architectural cruise around Manhattan. The cruise organized by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, features running commentary provided by experts and offers an easy opportunity to anyone wanting to get a good look at the... View full entry
The 11 floors tower of the HESAV (Health High School Vaud) has been animated as a rudimentary screen whose pixels are, in fact, all the windows and shutters that students, staff and friends shake for hours. This project announces the celebration "HESAV fait ses 400 coups!" from 1rst to 8th of November 2012 // — youtube.com
Yesterday we published the shortlist for the RIBA Manser Medal 2012 for the best new house, and today we're following up with the list of shortlisted houses for this year's Stephen Lawrence Prize which the RIBA announced just recently. [...] The prize, set up in memory of the teenager who was setting out on the road to becoming an architect when he was murdered in 1993, is intended to encourage fresh talent working with smaller budgets. — bustler.net
Architecture, the most public of endeavours, is practised by people who inhabit a smugly hermetic milieu which is cultish. If this sounds far-fetched just consider the way initiates of this cult describe outsiders as the lay public, lay writers and so on: it's the language of the priesthood. And like all cults its primary interest is its own interests, that is to say its survival, and the triumph of its values – which means building. — guardian.co.uk
TO THIS DAY I FIND THE PROCESS OF TEACHING WITH NUMBER CRUNCHING A HUGE MISTAKE. THE PRINCIPLES ARE WHAT COUNT. IF A STUDENT IS AWARE HOW THE STRUCTURE WORKS TO BE THE STRONGEST AND WEAKEST THEN THEY CAN DESIGN WITH KNOWLEDGE. — SMALL AT LARGE
Genius of Glen Small strikes and stuns again... This time it is Vertical City 3 from his student years at Cranbrook Academy of Art. It is "Down to Earth." View full entry
Spanish architectural magazine future arquitecturas recently announced the winners of its SC2012 Links: Bridging Rivers competition which called for innovative ideas of how to build a habitable bridge in two different sites: Chongqing (China) and Seville (Spain). Eligible for the international competition were architecture students or young architects under 35 years old. — bustler.net
Today we chat with a man on a mission, Stan Munro, creator of the astounding and ever-growing Toothpick World. Stan is out to re-create the world’s most famous buildings — using nothing but toothpicks and glue. — blog.makezine.com
The entry by LA-based Neil M. Denari Architects has won the First Prize in the international competition for the New Harbor Service Building in Keelung, Taiwan. — bustler.net
UPDATE: more detailed information about this project can be seen here:ShowCase: New Keelung Harbor Service Building View full entry
Over the last three decades, the design of U.S. embassies has been a balancing act between the need to protect diplomats and staff and the desire to project a positive image of the United States: welcoming buildings that showcase transparency and openness versus imposing and intimidating fortresses. But attacks on U.S. facilities, especially in the post-9/11 era, have tended to tilt the conversation toward the latter... — npr.org
The larger irony is that in calling for a huge new mosque in the tradition of Sinan, Erdoğan may be missing the more fundamental lesson of the Ottoman architect’s work. As Bruno Taut, the German architect who emigrated to Turkey to flee the Nazis, argued, Sinan was himself a proto-modernist whose ability to create extraordinary beauty from novel engineering had more in common with twentieth-century German functionalism than earlier Islamic architecture. — The New York Review of Books
In a politically analytical article in New York Review of Books, Hugh Eakin examines the power policies of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and his ambitious plan to crystallize the country's image and political agenda via a single building. A large new mosque in classical Ottoman... View full entry
The Royal Institute of British Architects has announced the shortlist for the RIBA Manser Medal 2012 for the best new house. — bustler.net
The five projects shortlisted for this prestigious private housing design award are Maison L by Christian Pottgiesser - architecturespossibles; Private House in East Sussex by Duggan Morris Architects; Private House in Gloucestershire by Found Associates; The Dune House in Thorpeness, Suffolk by... View full entry
Pedro E. Guerrero, a former art school dropout who showed up in the dusty Arizona driveway of Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939, boldly declared himself a photographer and then spent the next half-century working closely with him, capturing his modernist architecture on film, died on Thursday at his home in Florence, Ariz. He was 95. — nytimes.com
The architects, Grimshaw, have taken something delicate and beautiful and surrounded it with a building that looks like a 1980s bus station. Clumsy and ineptly detailed, their new glass greenhouse around the Cutty Sark totally ruins her thrilling lines, obscures much of her exquisite gilding and cynically forces anyone who actually wants to see her to pay their £12 and go inside. — blogs.telegraph.co.uk
If Nychaland was a city unto itself, it would be the 21st most populous in the U.S., bigger than Boston or Seattle, twice the size of Cincinnati. Despite these prodigious stats, the projects remain a mystery to most New Yorkers, a shadow city within the city, out of sight and mind, except when someone gets shot or falls down an elevator shaft—just these bad-news redbrick piles to whiz by on the BQE. — NY Magazine
Mark Jacobson visits New York City’s various housing projects, which are he argues the last of their kind in the country. He also suggests that they may be on their way to extinction. View full entry
Their singular issue is affordable housing, of which there will be some 150-units. The sticking point is that those apartments will only be reserved for low-income tenants for 35 years. The board wants permanent affordability, instead. “As a community board, we are supposed to do the best we can to preserve and maintain our communities and keep them going,” Mr. Nolan said. — observer.com