Give Coca-Cola points for architectural originality. It has built what looks like a series of red and white plastic blocks that have just been hit with buckshot and are exploding into shards. What is this thing? It is the Coca-Cola Beat Box, a “building that you can play,” as the company’s many young docents will exuberantly explain. — NYT
David Segal took readers on a tour of the corporate sponsorship pavilions at London's Olympic Park. Mr. Segal found corporate self-promotion run amok. Along with a range of architectural follies. View full entry
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and his wife were trying to find a nice San Francisco neighborhood for their young family to call home... they found what they were looking for, a 6,300-square-foot lot occupied by an early 1900s home that they now want to demolish to make way for a new house... The planned tear-down has ignited a Page Six controversy, pitting the rights of new tech money against an old community... trying to stop change on one of the city's most idyllic streets. — news.cnet.com
As growth slows, China's huge investment in infrastructure is looking ever harder to sustain, leaving a string of ambitious projects - towns, shopping malls and even a theme park - empty and forlorn. — bbc.co.uk
Artinfo spoke with Cathy Lang Ho curator of "Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good" the American Pavilion's inherently political theme at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. 18x32 opined "Go reread The Society of the Spectacle, get back to me with a new headline.—ed." The link is to a wikipedia entry on Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
News Wiel Arets it was announced, has been named Dean of Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture. lletdownl wrote in response to the news "This news had been floating around, and i had my fingers crossed. Though i know almost nothing about how good a job Arets will be able... View full entry
With the London 2012 Olympic Games still fondly in our memories, here is another architectural attraction you may have missed while watching the recent sporting events: the London 2012 BMW Group Pavilion designed by Serie Architects. — bustler.net
Imagine you’re a New York City building official, and the mayor’s office has decided to let an artist build a living room six stories up in the air and wrap it around a historic statue of Christopher Columbus in the middle of one of Manhattan’s busiest intersections.
Oh, and the plan is to have 100,000 people climb up stairs to view it.
— New York Times
According to its architect Eric Kuhne, head designer at the multinational firm CivicArts, Bluewater is "a city rather than a retail destination". — Guardian
With the news that the enormous north Kent shopping mall, is planning an extension Owen Hatherly examines the mall and its environs to ascertain the secrets of Bluewater's success. 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 Outdoors. ↑ House in a pinewood in... View full entry
One of the biggest pieces of outsider art in New York City, the Broken Angel, is confronting the latest stage of its gradual decline, from a 10-story distorted jumble of wood and glass, to a now more subdued house that still retains the creative energy of its builder, Arthur Wood. Wood’s son Christopher recently launched a Kickstarter project, with supporters paying for their original art to adorn the facade, the ultimate goal being to turn the building into a museum. — blogs.artinfo.com
Danish/American practice HAO / Holm Architecture Office has sent us latest renderings and constructions photos of their Samaranch Memorial Museum project for former Olympic president Juan Antonio Samaranch in Tianjin, China. The initial design scheme has undergone some adjusting and fine tuning since HAO won the international competition in collaboration with Archiland Beijing last year [...]. The museum is expected to be completed by the end of 2013. — bustler.net
Seoul-based firm HAEAHN architecture has shared with us images of its recently completed crematorium project, Seoul Memorial Park. The structure, located in the hills outside of Seoul, South Korea, was HAEAHN architecture's winning competition entry in 2009 and finally completed in 2012. — bustler.net
A new illustrated biography, Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography, by John Comazzi at the University of Minnesota School of Architecture tells the story of Balthazar Korab, one of the mid-twentieth century's most celebrated architecture photographers. It's the first book dedicated solely to... View full entry
After all the wrangling over the updated designs for the Durst Organization-overseen 1 World Trade Center (we’ve heard there was a list of 20 changes the developer wanted from the Port, all eventually granted), new renderings have been released for the project. They show a building that looks a little sharper, perhaps a little less striking, but something still bound to dominate the skyline, as if that were not already abundantly clear from the just-about-topped-out tower. — New York Observer
“I always thought that shorts were inappropriate for a federal courthouse,” Ms. Leal said. “But it’s either wearing it, or melting away.” — NYT
Fernanda Santos recently conducted an informal post-occupancy study for the Sandra Day O’Connor Federal Courthouse designed by Richard Meier & Partners Architects. Located in Phoenix, Arizona the project opened in 2000 and employs "a process known as adiabatic cooling to regulate... View full entry
[...] the architecture of wine is faced with a much greater challenge than meeting the very specific technical requirements of winemaking, it has to celebrate the process. Nowadays, wineries like religious buildings, are the must-visit destinations for tourists, where people go in droves on alcoholic pilgrimages. — huffingtonpost.com
