In 1958, Baghdad was featured in Time magazine—not as a hotbed of revolutionary, civil or sectarian strife, but for its ambitious plans for the world's most famous architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, to recapture through their modern buildings the city's former glory. — online.wsj.com
Left: loading screen / Right: highlighted content with section filter bar at the top We're really excited to announce the launch of the official Archinect iPhone app! The iPhone is by far the most popular mobile device that Archinect readers own, according to our web analytics, so we developed... View full entry
The British architect David Chipperfield will oversee a major renovation of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, a concrete, steel and glass landmark at Potsdamer Platz completed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1968.
Chipperfield has worked extensively in Berlin, finishing work on the war-ravaged Neues Museum on the Museum Island complex in 2009.
— bloomberg.com
The house is the world’s first temple to “Acid Modernism,” the aesthetic the California-born Aitken conceived for himself and Gemma Ponsa, his companion of the last six years. “The goal was to create a warm, organic modernism that’s also perceptual and hallucinatory,” he said of the design. “We thought that would be a wonderful environment to live in.” — nytimes.com
The giant mall you see in the photos here didn’t die. It has never lived, having been nothing but empty since it opened seven years ago. According to its Wikipedia entry, it has an astounding 2,350 available retail spaces, only 47 of which are occupied.
Meet the world’s largest shopping mall, the New South China Mall in Dongguan, China. It is twice as big as the huge Mall of America outside Minneapolis.
— thinkprogress.org
New studies are showing that Chinese cities are slowly sinking as a result of rapid development and excess groundwater use. According to reports, as many as 50 cities across the country are affected by soil subsidence, including the country’s largest - Shanghai. Apparently, Shanghai has been slowly sinking for at least 90 years. — inhabitat.com
In our last post, we published the winning designs of the [AC-CA]-hosted Amsterdam Iconic Pedestrian Bridge competition. Here's another proposal that didn't quite make the cut with the jurors, but we are happy to publish it. The author is Yaohua Wang, who – in past articles – managed to polarize the opinions like nobody else. — bustler.net
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Three outstanding bridge designs have recently been selected as winners in the Amsterdam Iconic Pedestrian Bridge competition. Hosted by [AC-CA], this open international competition called for proposals that would reflect contemporary design tendencies and also take into consideration the "urban insertion and impact geared towards creating a new architectural symbol for an European capital city." — bustler.net
London-based photographer Peter Guenzel explores the sparse and calming atmosphere of former limestone refinery turned eco hotel, Fabriken Furillen... the minimalist retreat is set amid the area’s untrammeled natural beauty featuring rocky coastline, wind-swept pines and glistening sea... founder Johan Hellström preserved its original infrastructure and recycled local materials such as concrete, limestone and hardwood to build the hotel's 17 rooms. — nowness.com
The fire engulfing Moscow’s Federation Tower has been extinguished. About 300 square meters of the yet-to-be-completed skyscraper were set ablaze, but the centrally located building has been evacuated and no victims have been reported. The fire broke on the building's 67th floor (250 meters above the ground) and spread to several sections on the 66th and 65th floors. Fourteen people working at the floors hit by the firestorm were evacuated. — rt.com
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Platescrapers navigates itinerant fare, comestible politics, and gastro-ritual to purvey stories about social issues and exaggerated realities; each story illustrates food as a monument to galvanize the public. — SOILED
SOILED is an architectural periodical based in Chicago. It investigates latent issues in the built environment and the politics of space. SOILED's latest issue, entitled Platescrapers, is out! With three issues to date, SOILED is available in both a print edition and a free downloadable PDF... View full entry
Back in 2009 SOM's City Design Practice took a comprehensive look at the the entire Great Lakes Lakes and the St. Lawrence, ecosystem and proposed The Great Lakes Century, a pro bono initiative - to begin a broad-based, bi-national dialogue. Reed Webster wrote that his "masters project was dealing with some of the same issues." His project waterWORKS was designed as a piece of a larger green-infrastructure plan for Traverse City, Michigan.
NewsNewly released numbers from the Census Bureau say Angelenos are living in the nation's most densely-populated urban area. New York still has the highest population, but at 7,000 people per square mile, the Los Angeles/Anaheim/Long Beach area takes the density prize. In light of these new... View full entry
Israel’s ages-old city, Jerusalem, is rightly famous for its warm, honey-colored limestone architecture. But its lazily hip rival, Tel Aviv, has lately begun garnering attention for a contrasting — and equally abundant — assemblage of cool and creamy Bauhaus buildings. — washingtonpost.com
A secondary school project in Gando, Burkina Faso, a community center project in São Paulo, Brazil, and an urban renewal plan in Berlin, Germany are the winners of the Global Holcim Awards for 2012. These leading sustainable construction projects were selected from 15 finalist submissions by a jury of independent experts led by Enrique Norten. The finalists were the regional Holcim Awards 2011 winning projects that had been selected from more than 6,000 entries in 146 countries. — bustler.net
The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge Celebration was the debut of Dallas’ newest architectural icon connecting Downtown Dallas to West Dallas over the Trinity River. More than 40,000 people attended the opening celebrations from Friday through Sunday, March 2-4, when it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to walk, run and party on the bridge and toast the best new view in town.
The bridge, Santiago Calatrava’s first vehicular bridge in the United States, will officially be opened to traffic this evening.
— bustler.net