Whatever else you might think about it, Boston City Hall is an improbable building. Call it a giant concrete harmonica or a bold architectural achievement, but to walk by this strange, asymmetrical structure in Government Center is to wonder how on earth it landed there. — bostonglobe.com
Fifty years after a groundbreaking competition, two architects look back at the project that polarized the city — and gave it a new lease on life View full entry
Too often during the bubble, banks and builders shunned thoughtful architecture and urban design in favor of cookie-cutter houses that could be easily repackaged as derivatives to be flipped, while architects snubbed housing to pursue more prestigious projects.
But better design is precisely what suburban America needs, particularly when it comes to rethinking the basic residential categories that define it, but can no longer accommodate the realities of domestic life.
— nytimes.com
One of France's most important landmarks of modernist architecture, La Cité Radieuse housing estate in Marseille, built by the architect Le Corbusier, has been damaged by fire.
Fire services fought for over 12 hours to put out a blaze that began on Thursday afternoon in a first floor flat in the nine-storey concrete complex which is protected by special heritage status in France.
— guardian.co.uk
On Thursday, Architect of the Capitol Stephen Ayers testified before the House Appropriations Legislative Branch subcommittee to explain why the boost is needed for fiscal year 2013.
According to Ayers, aging buildings around the Capitol campus and unexpected events, including last year’s 5.8-magnitude earthquake, will require more money.
— thehill.com
A team of two graduate students from Clemson University School of Architecture, Eric Laine and Suzanne Steelman, has won the international Dow Solar Design to Zero competition. The team's proposal LiveWork was awarded the first place award, along with a $20,000 prize sponsored by Dow Solar. — bustler.net
In this uniformity, I see a tendency among architects to respect and maintain the status quo, and a consensus about what architecture is and can do for our society. That’s the expression of a decorative understanding of architecture, even if it expresses itself in a subtle, modernist language. (Jacques Herzog) — Places Journal
On Places, Jacques Herzog discusses the recent work of Herzog & de Meuron and the challenges of maintaining a creatively vital practice, in an interview with Hubertus Adam and J. Christoph Burkle. View full entry
Global warming will make New York spectacularly vulnerable to flooding. Some researchers even suggest that in 200 years, Manhattan could look like Venice. Does that mean 8 million people oughta start packing their bags? Of course not. But experts agree the city should do something. Enter Tingwei Xu and Xie Zhang. The U Penn students think New York can protect itself the way a guy cracking lobster protects his tie: by strapping on a bib. — fastcodesign.com
Venturi and Schwartz’s efforts would have been for naught had it not been for Deborah Sarnoff and Robert Gotkin, a dermatologist and a plastic surgeon, respectively, who bought Lieb House for a dollar and spent another $100,000 moving it to Glen Cove, N.Y., where they turned it into a guesthouse that sits across the driveway from their home on the Long Island Sound — a spacious house that Venturi and Scott Brown’s firm completed in 1985. — tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com
More on the Lieb House move. View full entry
Invoking the “Wonders of the World,” Travel + Leisure has just released a comprehensive list of the top 60 must-see landmarks in the modern world. The winners include skyscrapers, bridges, museums, arenas and parks -- all constructed within the last 15 years – and readers took the opportunity to voice their favorites in an online poll. — constructiondigital.com
Some 600,000 commuters, riding Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, now suffer Penn Station every day. That makes it probably the busiest transit hub in the Western world, busier than Heathrow Airport in London, busier than Newark, La Guardia and Kennedy airports combined.
To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation.
— Michael Kimmelman, nytimes.com
The foreclosure of Bank of America Plaza comes as delinquency rates for commercial mortgage backed securities, or CMBS, a type of loan for commercial properties, reached an all-time high in metro Atlanta in December, according to Trepp, a real estate research firm. — ajc.com
The design shows Eisenhower as a youth gazing out at images of his adult accomplishments against a backdrop of the Kansas plains. But the Eisenhower family objects to the design and is attempting to delay approval of the project in a dispute that has pitted a leading American family against one of the country’s most recognized architects. The family says Mr. Gehry should portray Eisenhower as a man in the fullness of his achievements, not as a callow rustic who made good. — nytimes.com
Les Architectes FABG is the winning firm in the architecture competition for a new cultural venue adjacent to the St. Lawrence River in Montreal's Verdun Borough. The project includes a professional theater and also provides for redevelopment and expansion of Verdun's circus school, the École de cirque de Verdun. — bustler.net
Liang Sicheng (1901-1972) is known as China’s “Father of Modern Architecture,” but he expressed strong sentiments throughout his career when it came to preserving the country’s heritage and identity. In the 1950s, when Beijing was selected as the nation's capital, he lobbied to keep its ancient buildings intact and urged the government to build an entirely new city instead. The ruling party disagreed, and ancient Beijing has become a distant memory. — artinfo.com
The Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei collaboration – the 12th pavilion – breaks the mould of the sequence so far as the criterion for the commission had been for an architect not to have built in England. But Herzog & de Meuron are also deeply engaged in the art world, having built the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. They are currently working on art museums in New York, Miami and Kolkata. — ft.com