Kendall A. Nicholson, penned Architecture Gave Me a Black Eye: A Note to Architectural Educators. Therein he argues "Power structures are not dismantled by provocations and open letters, such as this, but by education and deliberate design interventions…Recognizing race as a social... View full entry
A large chunk of aluminum cladding fell off the Hancock building earlier this week, frightening neighbors. The piece of cladding fell about 3 p.m. Wednesday, landing atop a planter on the building’s south side off Chestnut Street. No one was injured. — Block Club Chicago
The incident is eerily reminiscent of the tragic 2019 death of architect Erica Tishman in Manhattan, which has resulted in recent criminal charges in addition to a host of lawsuits brought against the property developers and city by the architect’s family and Department of Buildings.  ... View full entry
Two patrons of former Texas Tech University professor Robert Bruno’s famous Ransom Canyon are up in arms over the fate of one of American architectural history’s most significant self-built structures. Texas Monthly is reporting that plans for the corten steel creation have caused an outcry of... View full entry
The Datong Art Museum has opened to the public in northern China, having recently been completed by Foster + Partners. The firm describes the new museum as a “landscaped terrain with a series of interconnected pyramids emerging from below the earth.” Image by Yang Chaoying for Foster +... View full entry
A 5-story, 122,000 office and retail building, set to be one of the largest Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) buildings in Los Angeles, is taking shape. For 843 N Spring Street, this month continues the installation of what will be 82,000 square feet of CLT panels in the hybrid timber structure... View full entry
Architects have known how to prevent their buildings from becoming bird killers for more than a decade: Patterned glass, exterior screens and turning the lights off at night can all significantly reduce bird deaths. But those standards clash with the big glass and big views that clients associate with big money. — Bloomberg CityLab
The problem stems from the way glass reflects green spaces surrounding them. Recent advancements in data and social media tracking have combined with architectural studies have been able to successfully produce guidelines which recommend a wide array of interventions like ceramic frits, visual dot... View full entry
Adjaye Associates’ $41.7 million Winter Park Library & Events Center in Winter Park, Florida is now complete. The library debuted to the public on December 13th during a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony. Developed through a public-private partnership with the City of Winter Park, the... View full entry
The wait is over for one of the most hotly-anticipated editions to the cultural landscape of Los Angeles in recent memory. OMA has announced the official completion of its much-heralded Audrey Irmas Pavilion for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Koreatown. The new building offers a unique center... View full entry
A new computer program powered by artificial intelligence takes mere minutes to determine whether homes and buildings have been destroyed by wildfires once the smoke has cleared.
Developed by scientists at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and Stanford University, DamageMap evaluates the destruction by scrutinizing post-wildfire aerial and satellite images.
— Santa Cruz Sentinel
The team worked to fix a major flaw in existing modeling systems that required exact lighting and photographic angles in order to produce an accurate survey of structural damage in a specific area. 50,000 images from various fires across California were used as a baseline for the software, which... View full entry
UCSF has released images of their proposed Helen Diller Medical Center, designed by Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with HDR Architecture. The 15-story hospital will be constructed on UCSF’s Parnassus Heights campus, with 336 inpatient beds, diagnostic and treatment services, clinical... View full entry
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has completed a 158-meter-tall, 33-story tower, located at the center of one of Shenzhen’s key business districts. The structure responds to the region’s tropical climate through a series of biophilic and sustainable design solutions. SOM was commissioned by... View full entry
Austin can’t get enough of Tesla, it seems. Developers of a master-planned community near the electric vehicle factory under construction submitted plans for 300 new apartments and 200 single-family homes to the city this month, according to the Austin Business Journal. — The Real Deal
Canadian company Brookfield Residential Properties wants to build the homes on vacant land in a 3,200-acre planned community in Southeast Austin called Easton Park. Brookfield is partnering with Houston-based Hines investment group on the project, and civil engineering firm Consort submitted the... View full entry
In December, developers closed on $30.3 million in financing for the first phase of Arverne East, a master-planned community and revitalization project within a 116-acre oceanfront site in the Arverne and Edgemere neighborhoods in Queens’ Rockaway Peninsula. Led by real estate firms L+M... View full entry
Ryuichi Sasaki/Sasaki Architecture has returned to the international spotlight with its winning entry for the mixed-use portion of this year’s Architecture MasterPrize that adds an iconic new touch to one of Tokyo’s oldest neighborhoods. Located in the city’s Minato ward, the... View full entry
What can be said of a world where one billionaire wants to build a giant tulip-shaped tower of little practical use and another wants to house thousands of students in windowless rooms in a block with all the charm of an Amazon distribution centre? — The Guardian
The Observer critic further continued his contrasting of Foster + Partner’s failed Tulip Tower with the Munger Hall development in California, claiming that each was the vanity project of a wayward billionaire. “Both projects seem driven by ego, but in the wide space between the brutal... View full entry