After a seemingly perfect start to the season, with temperatures well below the freezing point, Quebec City's ice hotel was hit by one of its fiercest opponents: fire.
A small blaze broke out in one of the hotel's 45 guest rooms early Tuesday morning, forcing the evacuation of the structure, made completely out of ice, at the Village Vacances Valcartier winter park.
"When I received the phone call they had to repeat twice that there was a fire in the ice hotel," said manager Jacques Desbois.
— CBC News
The fire was quickly extinguished and nobody was injured, however hotel operations had to be halted for a few days to remove smoke damage throughout the structure and buff up the snow and ice walls. CBC News reports that this was the first fire incident in the 17-season history of the Quebec City... View full entry
A major new public art work by Rachel Whiteread modelled on a suburban US house will be unveiled next week at the new US Embassy in Nine Elms, south London. The wall sculpture, titled US Embassy (Flat pack house; 2013-1015), will greet embassy visitors as they enter into the lobby through the consular court. The work was commissioned by Art in Embassies, a US governmental body. — The Art Newspaper
Artist Rachel Whiteread's name has become synonymous with the production of architectural interventions, invention and material playfulness through her large-scale artist sculptures, specifically her casts of the interiors of buildings. Her newest addition, installed in the US Embassy titled, US... View full entry
The Italian firm Ciclostile Architettura has converted a 1960s barn in the Bologna countryside into a workplace for the artist Francesca Pasquali. Inspired by the view, all main services—i.e. main rooms and rest rooms—have been concentrated on the ground floor, allowing the first floor to... View full entry
Virtual reality, a technology that most associate with gaming, entertainment and dystopic warnings from sci-fi writers including Ray Bradbury and Neal Stephenson, has moved into the real estate world in a big way. — The Guardian
With increasing frustration of penthouse shoppers reaching an immeasurable high, a novel application of new technology has been making a splash in the real estate market. Virtual reality has become the go-to tool for allowing real estate investors the opportunity to see precisely what they are... View full entry
The $600-million project, called 1111 Sunset, would include high-rise condominium and apartment towers, town houses, shops, restaurants and two acres of public open space designed by James Corner Field Operations, the landscape architect behind New York’s High Line elevated park. [...]
The 98-room boutique hotel is to be designed by Kengo Kuma. It would be the major Los Angeles project for the high-profile Japanese architect known for melding his structures to their natural surroundings.
— Los Angeles Times
Image: SOM/Palisades.First announced last October, the redevelopment of the William Pereira-designed former Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District HQ, right on the edge of Downtown Los Angeles and Echo Park, is further taking shape. Besides new renderings of the 1111 Sunset Boulevard... View full entry
Volkan Alkanoglu has a prolific history of producing provocative interventions that playfully embrace the audience while researching and experimenting with the limits of color, geometry, depth and the representational techniques which use them. From his Cloudscape playground in Florida to his... View full entry
Still, the house offers the rigor of thought and careful design and supports projection. Maybe we come to realize that it is our simple, logical certainties that have most misled us. — Under Construction
The advantage to coming to a well-known work late and as an outsider—I’m a writer, not an architect—is that I saw it fresh, away from the noise of adulation and reaction. Making a model of Eisenman's House II gave me a chance to experience it closely, over time, as well as provided a... View full entry
London’s new US embassy may be just a glass cube with disguised fortifications, but it is also restrained, efficient, green… the antithesis of Donald Trump [...]
It’s a fortress, of course it is. As the embassy of the Great Satan to the Little Satan – as the unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini would have put it – it couldn’t not be a target and defended accordingly. The architects therefore decided to make it as nice a fortress as possible [...].
— The Guardian
The new embassy in Battersea Nine Elms seen from across the river Thames. Image via Wikipedia.Only a few more days until the U.S. Embassy & Consulates in the United Kingdom move into the new digs (designed by KieranTimberlake) in Nine Elms on January 16. Sans Trump. View full entry
Preliminary Research Office, headed by Yaohua Wang, Dingliang Yang and Chloe Natanél Brunner, has shared their proposal for the YeouiNaru Ferry Terminal. The proposed Ferry Terminal is situated upon Seoul’s Han River and is surrounded by both natural and urban landscapes. The project uses... View full entry
In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles. (Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles!)... View full entry
Had things gone differently, France's Arc De Triomphe could have been a massive giant elephant!—at least, that is what architect Charles Ribart envisioned for the landmark back in 1759 before his proposal was rejected by the French Government. Similarly, Sydney's iconic Opera House, known for... View full entry
Belgian maker of architectural prefabricated concrete elements, Enjoy Concrete, show us how the product can be the architecture in its most beautiful sense: when the company was in need of a new industrial facility in the small town of Veurne, they partnered with Govaert & Vanhoutte Architects... View full entry
Photographer Francois Prost's recent photo series, Paris Syndrome, reveals just how far China's "duplitecture" went in the city of Tianducheng. Pairing images of China's replica city with its Paris equivalent—side by side it can be initially unclear which is the original. ... View full entry
Building owner Mick Ruis had set a Jan. 10 deadline for preservation groups to raise $1.7 million in cash to buy the building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Local business leaders, the Montana Preservation Alliance and the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy all were working toward a deal that would have spared the building [...] It is the first viable Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building to be lost in more than 40 years. — Daily InterLake
In a frustrating turn of events, Frank Lloyd Wright's Lockridge Medical Clinic — which was completed after his death in 1959 — in Whitefish, Montana was demolished overnight. The building's current owner Mick Ruis moved up his demolition plans and refused to give more time to preservation... View full entry
Remember that waste-to-energy incinerator Bjarke Ingels designed for Copenhagen with a ski slope on top a few years back? The plant itself (dubbed 'Copenhill') was already completed and opened in March of 2017, but the ski-slope-rooftop-park-cherry-on-top was left behind — until now: Danish... View full entry
