At the urging of billionaire Paul Allen, planners are considering raising the height limit for new buildings in certain areas of the city — bendbulletin.com
The Glass House and The National Trust for Historic Preservation have announced Urbach's appointment as Director of the historic site.
"I can hardly imagine a place more full of potential than the Glass House," said Urbach. "It has long contributed to culture by bringing together art, architecture, landscape and people in significant and inventive ways. That is exactly what I hope to foster."
— thestamfordtimes.com
Reacting to the Beach & Howe Tower proposal in Vancouver by Bjarke Ingels Group holz.box argued "still beats 90% of what's out there. i'd love to see this built."
x architekten’s OASIS, Pastoral Care Voestalpine project, a polygonal, built landscape is featured in the latest ShowCase. With her latest edition of CONTOURS titled Urbanism, Housing, and the Economy, Sherin Wing examined the significance of the fact that housing and... View full entry
ARTIST Damien Hirst has unveiled plans to build more than 500 landmark eco-homes in Ilfracombe, which he hopes will regenerate the town and provide a national blueprint for environmental housing.
Architects working for Hirst, said to be the richest living artist in the world, hope to submit a planning application for the development at Winsham Farm in six months.
— thisisnorthdevon.co.uk
Monticello is home renovation run amok. Thomas Jefferson was as passionate about building his house as he was about founding the United States; he designed Monticello to the fraction of an inch and never stopped changing it. Yet Monticello was also a plantation worked by slaves, some of them Jefferson’s own children. Today his white and black descendants still battle over who can be buried at Monticello. It was trashed by college students, saved by a Jewish family, and celebrated by FDR. — Studio 360
... one the most gifted architects of my time has been reduced to wrapping such conventional programs of use in merely expressionistic forms, without letting a single ray of her genius illuminate the human condition. Am I being pretentious and overly demanding? Of course. But that’s the way disappointed lovers behave. Exaggerated emotions. Absurd demands. Anger that transgresses all reason. She has let me down, and what makes it worse is that she apparently couldn’t care less. — Lebbeus Woods
We are happy to also present the second prize winner of the 2012 Design to Zero competition: Project Zero, a collaborative effort by graduate students Daniel Kim and Caitlin Ranson from Clemson University School of Architecture [...]. Project Zero seeks to redefine the "unit," focusing on the tight relationship between material unit, family unit, and living unit. The site chosen for the proposal is in a historic residential district not far from downtown Grennville, South Carolina. — bustler.net
President Obama will speak at the official groundbreaking next week for the Smithsonian's new African American history museum in Washington, museum officials announced.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture will be situated on the National Mall and is expected to be completed by 2015 at an estimated price cost of $500 million, half of which is expected to be paid by the government.
— latimesblogs.latimes.com
Marina Abramovic signed a deal with architect Rem Koolhaus earlier this week to design and construct her Center for the Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson, New York. The Serbian art superstar will seek to raise $8 million to pay for the project, she revealed Tuesday night to a group of art collectors at a panel at Manhattan's tony Core Club, and the museum will be devoted to performance art pieces of "six hours minimum." Some of them will go on for days. — vulture.com
An aesthetic traditionalist who sponsors an annual architecture award that bears his name, Driehaus is no fan of Frank Gehry's proposed modernist design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. And he's doing what he can to fight it.
Earlier this week, a public relations operative who works for Driehaus called me and offered the following essay, by the influential neo-traditionalist architect Leon Krier, who offers a tough critique of Gehry's plan and ideology.
— BLAIR KAMIN, chicagotribune.com
Just a few days ago, we published the winning entry of the 2011 DOW Design to Zero competition. Here is now also the third prize winner, the entry Oil Silo Home, by architects Leon Lai and Eric Tan of pinkcloud.dk. The proposal recycles existing oil silos by transforming them into affordable housing for families worldwide. — bustler.net
Forget Facebook, I've got a whole new IPO for you. The owners of the Empire State Building filed papers to go public this week. — marketplace.org
The proposal is for a mixed-use development. On the Howe Street side, there will be a 49-storey residential tower with a 9-storey podium which includes market rental housing, commercial uses, and a childcare facility. The building height is at 150 metres and will be the tallest building on the southern end of downtown and the 4th tallest building in the city, unless the Ritz Carlton site gets developed before this, in which case it would be the 5th tallest. — vancitybuzz.com
Several years ago a Swedish-American company called Plantagon unveiled plans for a series of massive skyscraper greenhouses that stood to transform urban farming in large cities. While the spiraling vertical farms seemed too good to be true at the time, Plantagon just broke ground on its very first vertical farm this week in Linkoping, Sweden. — Inhabitat
Preservationist John Linnert, a Costa Mesa architect, noticed crews working on the upstairs interior in January and reported them to the city planning staff. He has kept a close watch on the building in recent years. — latimes.com