Just off the narrow, crowded streets of Greenwich Village is a lush, spacious garden of drooping mature willows and sycamores.
New York University, its owner, fights for its destruction.
If the university prevails, two curvy towers shaped like chocolate drops will arise from the garden. The million square feet of new construction are the space equivalent of a hefty skyscraper.
— bloomberg.com
in professional practice, there’s a tendency to lose track of the initial spark that drew us to the profession and fall into a routine of designing similar projects for a familiar client type without thinking too deeply about it. It’s hard to make any money in the profession without a certain amount of repetition and standardization. So when a project comes along that challenges your values, that would be a good time to reconnect with the reasons you got into your profession in the first place. — thepolisblog.org
polis has published an interview with Raphael Sperry, former president of ADPSR, and founder of the Alternatives to Incarceration / Prison Design Boycott Campaign. View full entry
MASS Design Group is one of a handful of nonprofits showing that design isn’t just for the wealthy, nor is it just image-making. The challenge, for MASS and others trying to do public service design work, is to make their operations financially sustainable. As students, MASS provided much of their work on the Butaro Hospital pro bono, but they are not students anymore. The staff of MASS eclipsed 20 in the past year... — blog.sfgate.com
Related: ShowCase: Butaro Hospital in Rwanda View full entry
Beginning on May 19th, people will see the Barnes collection not where Barnes intended it to be seen, but in a new building designed by the New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.
This building won’t please the absolutists, the people we should probably call Barnes fundamentalists, because nothing would please them short of a return to the way things were. But it really ought to please everybody else, because—to cut to the chase—the new Barnes is absolutely wonderful.
— vanityfair.com
The Zaha Hadid Architects-designed Riverside Museum in Glasgow, Scotland has been named the most innovative museum in the fields of technology, labor and social history by the European Museum Academy. Riverside competed against museums in 12 other European countries to win the 17th annual Micheletti Award. — bustler.net
With the UK entering a double-dip recession, let's just hope the Riverside Museum enjoys a better fate than Hadid's Maxxi Museum in Rome (previously on Archinect). View full entry
Berlin's J. MAYER H. is currently designing a series of twenty rest areas along a new highway in the Caucasus Republic of Georgia, connecting Azerbaijan and Turkey. Two rest areas have already been completed, and a third one is currently under construction with completion scheduled for this year. Here are some photos of the two stations, Gori and Lochini. — bustler.net
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 Interiors. ↑ Coffee Bar Montgomery... View full entry
Elected officials in Goshen, N.Y., voted Thursday against a resolution to demolish and replace the Orange County Government Center, a late-1960s building in the small Hudson Valley town that sparked debate on the value of modern architecture.
"I am deeply disappointed by the outcome of today's vote," Mr. Diana said in a written statement.
— online.wsj.com
After spending last year traipsing below the border to break ground on his first few projects in Mexico, Richard Meier is heading below the equator to start his first South American project: a light, modernist office building in the beach-lined metropolis and future Olympic host city Rio de Janeiro. — ARTINFO
The Arch, a new cultural center in the small southern Norwegian town Mandal has officially opened to the public this April. Designed by Danish practice 3XN, construction had commenced in December 2009 and was completed in December 2011. — bustler.net
Archive of Affinities is a very interesting new(ish?) Tumblr documenting architectural patent applications. View full entry
The House of Tomorrow, a modernist,12-sided exhibition home built for Chicago's 1933 World's Fair is among Indiana's 10 most endangered buildings, according to the state's leading preservation group.
Designed by Chicago architects George and William Keck, the house wowed fairgoers with then unheard of features such as glass exterior walls, air conditioning, a dishwasher and automatically opening kitchen and garage doors. The home even had an airplane bay on its ground floor.
— wbez.org
One of the world’s biggest floating openair swimming pools will open on the Eilandje in Antwerp, Belgium at the Kattendijkdok in mid-August. The pool, with a total length of 120 meters (394 feet), can accommodate 600 people and consists of a swim basin, two event venues, several floors and a restaurant with a lounge terrace. — bustler.net
'Badboot' was designed by architect Pieter Peerlings and Silvia Mertens of Sculp(IT) Architecten, known for the narrowest house in Antwerp (remember this incredibly popular Archinect Showcase Feature?). View full entry
International architectural practice 10 Design has shared with us their concept of a headquarter park for pharmaceutical company Yabao in Shenzhen, China. Construction of this massive project already commenced last October and is well underway. — bustler.net
Stoll’s images capture vast and mind-meltingly valuable landscapes that are hidden in plain sight, housed in unassuming warehouses and suburban data centers all over the world. — fastcodesign.com