It was built for stockbrokers and bankers in their thousand dollar suits to make million dollar deals, but for nearly two decades it has held the less impressive title of the world’s tallest squat. Welcome to the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, more commonly known as the Torre David (the Tower of David) in Caracas, Venezuela, an unfinished skyscraper which has now been colonised by an ad hoc community of over 700 families. — messynessychic.com
It’s a relief on the block, representing the diversity vital to healthy streets — not a perfect building, not even its architects’ best work. But its unembarrassed, luxuriant materiality, its small scale and vulnerability, all qualities that the Modern now seems to reject, belong no less than the glass tower to the messy story of Modernism and city life. — nytimes.com
Slowly it dawned on me that this was not a photograph of a real building but a total digital fabrication. I was shocked, not in a moralistic way but, rather, with amazement at the masterful deception and amused pique at being fooled. — Places Journal
The technologies of representing architecture have advanced steadily over the years, from drawing to photography to digital rendering — and have lately taken a new leap. On Places, Belmont Freeman argues, "the crafts of architectural rendering and photography have now merged into a common... View full entry
As alumni living abroad in Berlin, we stand In solidarity with the students occupying the presidents office. We are moved by the actions of the occupying students, enraged by the actions of the Board of Trustees, President Bharucha, and former President Campbell. We are demonstrating outside of John Hejduk's Kreuzberg Tower to symbolize the legacy of Cooper Union and the global reach of free education. Long live Cooper Union, demand free education! — Free Cooper Union Facebook Page
On May 12th Cooper Union alumni in Berlin gathered in front of the Kreuzberg Tower, designed by John Hejduk to show solidarity with Free Cooper Union. This action is in correlation with a student occupation of 50+ students who have currently been occupying the president of Cooper Union, Jamshed... View full entry
Thursday, MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry sent a memo to MoMA's trustees and staff announcing the museum had retained Diller Scofidio + Renfro to "work with us to design a plan that will integrate the Museum's current building with the property of the American Folk Art Museum. . . . We readily agreed to consider a range of options, and look forward to seeing their results." — AM New York
Thursday, MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry sent a memo to MoMA's trustees and staff announcing the museum had retained Diller Scofidio + Renfro to "work with us to design a plan that will integrate the Museum's current building with the property of the American Folk Art Museum. . . . We readily... 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. Today's top images (in no particular order) are from the board Glass. ↑ Historic Wicker Park 2-Flat... View full entry
Three winners and one honorable mention have been announced in DawnTown Miami's 2013 ideas competition entitled Landmark Miami. This year’s theme focused on how cities are instantly identified by the individual structures within them. [...] architects and designers were tasked with creating an iconic architectural piece that contributes to the image of Miami. — bustler.net
AFTER impassioned protests from prominent architects, preservationists and design critics, the Museum of Modern Art said on Thursday that it would reconsider its decision to demolish its next-door neighbor, the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, to make room for an expansion. — nytimes.com
In a board meeting on Thursday morning, the directors were told that a board committee had selected the design firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro to handle the expansion and to help determine whether to keep any of the existing structure. View full entry
Gold and Silver Medalists of the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence have been announced this week, marking twenty-five years of honoring innovative urban placemaking. — bustler.net
This film was shot in October last year when the Internet Archive celebrated a landmark --10 petabytes of stored media. Tour the space, which still looks more like a church than a library and see where millions of books are digitized and stored in a facility in Richmond, CA. — theatlantic.com
The president still has three years in office, but eventually his thoughts will turn to what comes afterward. [...]
A presidential library has to be easily accessible to scholars and visitors, so Chicago has a clear advantage. That’s why Honolulu’s leaders named their public campaign carefully: The Hawaii Presidential Center Initiative, not a presidential library.
— marketplace.org
Previously: The LA Times' Christopher Hawthorne reviews the "fittingly blunt" Bush presidential library View full entry
When I walked out to get breakfast this morning, clouds had obscured all but the topmost workings of the 1 World Trade Center site, visible through our living room window—a strange vision of machines, pulleys, cranes, and gears sort of hovering in the sky, like something out of Archigram by way of Hayao Miyazaki. — bldgblog.blogspot.com
Designed and built by the office of Oyler Wu Collaborative along with students of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Stormcloud is the third project in a series of installations designed for SCI-ARC. The previous two installations, Netscape and Centerstage were... View full entry
We have received photos and a video of a pretty stunning temporary pavilion built with 3,000 corrugated hexagonal cardboard boxes for the annual “Fallas” festival in the Spanish city of Valencia. The pavilion design was a collaborative effort between Miguel Arraiz García of bipolaire arquitectos and David Moreno Terrón of Pink Intruder. — bustler.net
"OpenStreetMap is not about crowdsourcing, OpenStreetMap is about community collaboration. This is not you being a mindless crowd adding data to some big company’s map. This is about you putting in data in your own neighborhood, working with your neighbors, working with a larger community to refine and make a really cohesive map. That's the kind of experience that was so successful with Wikipedia." — Atlantic Cities
Get to know your world and not just the restaurants. Somewhat related: Constellations of Los Angeles View full entry