Dion Neutra, the son of the 20th century architect Richard Neutra and a practitioner in his own right who also waged a decades-long war to save his father’s iconic buildings from the ravages of time, remodeling and demolition, has died at his home on Neutra Place in Silver Lake, a neighborhood studded with Neutra architecture.
Neutra, who was 93, died Sunday in his sleep, said his brother, Raymond Neutra.
— The Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times highlights the life and career of Dion Neutra, the son and collaborator of Richard Neutra, the famed Los Angeles architect behind many of the city's sleek Modernist-era structures. Dion worked alongside his father on some of the firm's most creative works, including the VDL... View full entry
How can we make stronger building materials? An experiment conducted by Rice University's Brown School of Engineering explores this limit by manipulating materials like plastic, metal, and concrete to match the strength of diamonds. 3D printed blocks made at Rice University. Image... View full entry
New York City-based legal group Disability Rights Advocates (DRA) has filed a class action lawsuit against a collection of public agencies representing the borough of Queens, New York "challenging the inaccessibility" of the new Steven Holl Architects-designed Hunters Point Library, according... View full entry
The U.S. is at the beginning of a tidal wave of homes hitting the market on the scale of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s. This time it won’t be driven by overbuilding, easy credit or irrational exuberance, but by an inevitable fact of life: the passing of the baby boomer generation. — The Wall Street Journal
A report in The Wall Street Journal highlights the coming vacancy crisis set to impact America's retirement communities and exurbs as members of the Baby Boomer generation age out of independent living with fewer members of younger generations left—or willing—to take their... View full entry
A project team lead by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), nARCHITECTS, Perkins Eastman, and W Architecture and Landscape Architecture has unveiled renderings for a new economic hub slated for the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Overall view of... View full entry
Eleanor Marshall examined how and why "there is a significant pay gap between men and women in architecture" on both sides of the Atlantic. Will Galloway totally supports transparent salaries "It may not solve the underlying problems, still worth it to make the difference an obvious one. Employers... View full entry
Students at the Yale University School of Architecture have completed construction on the 2019 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, a student-led design-build exploration that has brought a three-unit "triple-decker"-style home into existence. View of a upperlevel balcony-porch attached to... View full entry
Known for his work on The New York Times Building, the Whitney Museum, and the Morgan Library expansion, Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano has completed his first residential building in NYC at 565 Broome Street. The Soho tower has 115 residences, ranging from studios to four-bedroom condos. Uber’s Travis Kalanick and tennis star Novak Djokovic have already scooped up units in the building, where sales launched last September. — 6sqft
The United States Department of State has selected a team from the University of Illinois at Chicago to curate the United States Pavilion at the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale. The team, led by architects Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner, will create an installation in the pavilion... View full entry
This post is brought to you by Ceramics of Italy Tile Competition *Update: Competition deadline has been extended to January 31st.* Confindustria Ceramica (the Italian Association of Ceramics) and the Italian Trade Agency have just announced the official call for entries for... View full entry
This post is brought to you by Cupa Pizarras Smart sustainability is not “just a fad” in contemporary architectural design — it's a lifelong necessity. Natural slate has proven to be a reliable exterior building material for its timeless appearance and its remarkable resistance... View full entry
An earthquake safety revolution is spreading along the streets and back alleys of Los Angeles, as steel frames and strong walls appear inside the first-story parking garages of thousands of apartment buildings.
The construction is designed to fix one of the most dangerous earthquake risks: Wood apartment buildings collapsing because the skinny poles propping up parking at the ground level are not strong enough to withstand the shaking.
— The Los Angeles Times
A building permit analysis conducted by The Los Angeles Times has found that over 27% of Los Angeles’s 11,400 "soft story" wood-frame apartments have been retrofitted since 2015 when the city passed an aggressive seismic upgrading ordinance. "Soft story" buildings are built with an... View full entry
With the completion of Hutong Bubble 218, MAD Architects made one step forward with their Beijing 2050 proposal, which they introduced during the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. The latest Hutong Bubble project features metallic “bubbles” embedded on the rooftop of a 305-square-meter... View full entry
I built a house around a house [using chain-link fence, corrugated metal, asphalt, and other common building materials]. It was the first completely free piece I did. I did it exactly the way I wanted. My client was me and my wife, and my wife egged me on. … I talked about the asphalt floor, and I was going to chicken out, and she said, “Come on, I want to see that.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
A recently published Los Angeles Review of Books interview conducted by Steven Jay Fogel and Mark Bruce Rosin with Frank Gehry in 1991 highlights a few fascinating tidbits of the architect's early life and his career pre-Bilbao. In the wide-ranging interview, Gehry discusses, among other... View full entry
Homes For All United States Representative Ilhan Omar has unveiled a new piece of legislation that seeks to reinvigorate public housing construction across the country by building 12 million new public and affordable housing units over the next decade. The so-called “Homes for All Act”... View full entry
