Some people might mentally retch that the United Nations, believing the world's population could hit 9 billion by 2050, thinks we should prepare to eat bugs.
Not the folks at Sweden's Belatchew Arkitekter, though: They want to fast-track the insect-munching. Thus they've whipped up plans to build "vermin farms" upon Stockholm's major intersections, so that by 2018 everybody in the city will be guaranteed plentiful rations of six-legged foodstuffs.
— citylab.com
On Thursday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel belatedly jumped into the fray after a public campaign against the sign on Chicago's second-tallest building spearheaded by the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin.
“Mayor Emanuel believes this is an architecturally tasteful building scarred by an architecturally tasteless sign,” Kelley Quinn, the mayor’s newly-appointed communications director, said in an emailed statement.
— politics.suntimes.com
Trump responds in his typical classy style... Before I bought the site, the Sun Times had the biggest, ugliest sign Chicago has ever seen. Mine is magnificent and popular. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2014 View full entry
KCRW, the NPR-affiliated public radio darling of Southern California, broke ground yesterday on its new 35,000 square-foot Media Center, located on Santa Monica College's Academy of Entertainment & Technology campus. For the past thirty years, KCRW was run out of a basement underneath the... View full entry
In the latest Hong Kong Institute of Architects (HKIA) Annual Awards, Aedas was no doubt victorious once again with two preservation/renewal projects: "Art Community": Revitalisation Project in Wan Chai, Hong Kong and Center 66 in Wuxi, China. As the highest architectural awards program in Hong Kong, the HKIA Awards recognizes outstanding architecture designed by HKIA members. — bustler.net
Aedas once again won the highest honor, Medal of the Year, in addition to the Special Architectural Award in Heritage + Adaptive Reuse for the Revitalisation Project.Here's a glimpse of the project, which preserved and revived an early 20th-century shophouse building into a public space for arts... View full entry
In land-scarce Singapore greenery too is going sky-ward, with a 24-storey condominium earning a Guinness record for boasting the world’s largest vertical garden.
Tree House condominium, completed in 2013 by property firm City Developments Limited, has covered its façade in nearly 2,300 square meters of greenery. [...]
The condo uses the plants as natural insulation to help filter pollution, absorb heat and reduce the amount of energy needed to cool individual units.
— blogs.wsj.com
Not unlike his buildings—with their uncompromising linearity, precise use of natural light, and stark white facades—Richard Meier is a striking figure. In his signature round spectacles, a perfectly pressed suit, and with that recognizable shock of white hair, the Pritzker Prize-winning modernist invited filmmaker Barbara Anastacio on a tour of the newly opened Richard Meier Model Museum. — NOWNESS
Richard Meier’s Models on Nowness.com View full entry
The University of California, Santa Cruz recently selected notable New York firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects to design the university's new Institute of the Arts and Sciences. Competition was tough indeed, as TWBTA was one of three finalists that included Allied Works Architecture and... View full entry
Ask almost any of the local architects in this Mexican border town and they will tell you Tijuana has become a hotbed of building activity.
The growing demand for designer homes, they say, is being driven primarily by Tijuana natives returning to the city...
Most of the developments in Tijuana are for upper-middle-class families ... but the spare designs and basic building materials, especially concrete, used by Mr. Medina and others make it possible for more residents to have designed homes.
— nytimes.com
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... View full entry
Workers are digging the foundation for a twin-towered apartment building that will obscure the great flying buttresses and stained-glass windows of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights.
Preservationists, neighbors and architects are justly up in arms. [...] Even the developer laments how the approval process for new buildings in New York spews out too many projects that nobody really likes.
— nytimes.com
After landing a $42,750 Innovation Fund grant from AIA for the project, the Vermont chapter purchased a 21-foot 1969 Airstream Globetrotter from a retired couple in central Vermont. Then it charged an undergraduate architecture class at Norwich University with redesigning and rebuilding its gutted interior.
The Archistream, as AIAVT has dubbed its mobile classroom, is now complete.
— sevendaysvt.com
Decades of socialism and military rule kept Myanmar — or Burma, as it was known — poor and isolated.
There was one upside, though. The economy was so lousy, there was no drive to demolish the big British colonial buildings in Yangon, Myanmar's largest city, and replace them with the glass and steel towers that now define much of the skylines in East Asia.
[...] remarkable architectural heritage, which has come into the cross hairs of developers trying to cash in on rising land prices.
— npr.org
The collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is inching closer to safety. The Michigan State Legislature agreed yesterday to contribute $350m over the next 20 years to protect the museum’s works of art and shore up Detroit’s ailing pension funds. The state’s governor Rick Snyder is expected to sign the bill, which is part of a package to help settle the city’s bankruptcy, by the end of the week. — theartnewspaper.com
Previously: Detroit Institute of Arts: $330 million pledged to save the city's art collection View full entry
The flagship museum of the billionaire financier and art collector Eli Broad, still under construction, has filed a $19.8 million lawsuit against a German company for what it describes as delays in fabricating the building blocks for its unusual latticed facade. — nytimes.com
The Fondation Cartier, the Paris-based contemporary art foundation, has abandoned plans to relocate from its central Paris premises [...].
In 2011, the president and founder of the Fondation Cartier, Alain Dominique Perrin, asked the French architect Jean Nouvel, to draw up preliminary plans for a new base on Ile Seguin. But Perrin tells The Art Newspaper that he has decided to enlarge the Fondation’s current premises in Boulevard Raspail, and will commission Nouvel to work on the expansion.
— theartnewspaper.com