Danish and French architects BIG & OFF, engineers Buro Happold, consultants Michel Forgue and environmental engineer Franck Boutte is the winning team to design the new 15,000 m2 research center for Sorbonne Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. The winning team was honored as the best design among proposals from MVRDV, Lipsky Rollet, Mario Cucinella and Peripherique. — bustler.net
Some congregants at Crystal Cathedral said they felt blindsided by the church board after it threw its weight behind a bid from the Catholic Church –- an offer that effectively boots them from their landmark site in Garden Grove.
The ruling by U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Robert Kwan to allow the sale of Crystal Cathedral to the Diocese of Orange was met with tears.
— latimesblogs.latimes.com
Philip Johnson's iconic church gets purchased by the Catholic church. View full entry
Finally, sameolddoctor wants to talk about architecture and the ethics of working in developing countries vs the ethics of vanity skyscraper projects. Citizen responds:
We don't have to go overseas for ethical dilemmas! How about the shiny new project on theseshores...
whose architect uses unpaid intern labor?
with the bold, avante garde design that is opposed by all the neighbors?
whose objective is to make more profit for an already-wealthy developer?......
In Part three of the Countours features, What Should Architecture Occupy?, Part Three, Sherin Wing, attempts to summarize the responses to Archinect’s OWS poll and since OWS itself is about giving people a voice, she contends "the best way to encapsulate the results is to quote... View full entry
Games gurus and architects have much in common: both design the movement of people through space. Assassin's Creed: Revelations, set in 16th-century Constantinople, writes that similarity large.
To furnish the video-game's levels with verisimilitude, art director Raphael Lacoste and mission design director Falko Poiker turned draftsmen. They made a research trip to the city (today's Istanbul) to collect images that could be turned into computer graphics.
— wired.co.uk
The exhibit also has models of grandiose never-built projects, like converting more than 62 acres of what's now Foggy Bottom into "The National Galleries of History and Art".
"Nothing in the built environment is inevitable," commented Moeller, senior vice president of the National Building Museum. "It's very unpredictable. There are some accidents. Often as not, things don't go according to plan."
— examiner.com
The house was just $1. The catch? A delivery charge of nearly $22,000.
.....Moving a house is, in theory, relatively simple.
— New York Times
Households have evolved. But New York’s housing stock hasn’t. In essence, New Yorkers have increasingly had to adapt to the housing we’ve got, instead of designing and building the housing that suits who we have become. — New York Times
When completed in 2015, Hotel Crescent will stand on the banks of the Caspian Sea, its 33-stories housed in a vast, down-turned crescent. A sister project was proposed called the Full Moon Hotel that would have brought something resembling the Death Star from "Star Wars" to the Caspian coastline. — edition.cnn.com
Folly architecture, from the French word for 'foolish,' is eccentric and extravagant architecture with an appearance that far overshadows its purpose. Often, its appearance is its sole purpose. The architectural marvels below take many forms, made all around the world from the 19th century to the 90's. There are underground tunnels, an upside down church and a giant banana. — huffingtonpost.com
Death is not a happy subject, so most of us would undoubtedly prefer not to think about funeral homes. But sooner or later, we're likely to end up in one, if only to attend someone else's service. That's why it's fascinating to step into the newest chapel of Chicago Jewish Funerals, which has two other suburban locations.
This adventurous modernist building, at 8851 Skokie Blvd. in north suburban Skokie, isn't a great work of architecture, but it's a telling one.
— chicagotribune.com
Richard.Rozewski, discusses a microtecture solution being developed by a friend Patrick of APOC. Stephanie however contends “ the idea that this will promote sustainable living is patently false...the construction, however small, of individual buildings for individual people, will always inherently mean the opposite of 'sustainable' ” To which holz.box responded “false false false. microtecture can be very sustainable”.
In Archinect’s latest In Focus feature we talk to British photo artist Simon Gardiner. Simon is a “street photographer who fuses the street with a cinematic feel”. Guy Horton, in part two of the What Should Architecture Occupy series, argues that what... View full entry
All over Los Angeles, the places where artists, architects and engineers were busy in the postwar years inventing the future are being recast as monuments and historical shrines.
This new attitude toward the city's recent heritage can be seen in increasingly visible battles over the fate of postwar landmarks like Richard Neutra's Kronish House in Beverly Hills and in nascent efforts to preserve and display artifacts from the early years of the computer and aerospace industries in Los Angeles.
— latimes.com
... the enthusiasm in Cape Town for architecture that excites and enlightens people about health is especially rewarding. “We've never seen anything like this anywhere,” Farrow says, about the notion of wellness being trumpeted so loudly through architecture. — theglobeandmail.com
Winners have recently been revealed in Aarhus, Denmark, for the new Brabrand Housing Association residential complex competition. The winning team consists of Danish architects ADEPT and LUPLAU & POULSEN, turn-key contractor Dansk Boligbyg and NIRAS Consulting Engineers. The team has designed a project [...] that consists of 238 public dwellings distributed between 83 apartments for families and +55 aged seniors, and 155 student-housing units. — bustler.net
Construction of the new Maritime Museum and Science Center started this week in Porsgrunn, Norway. The building, designed by Danish architecture offices COBE and TRANSFORM, conveys Norway’s transformation from a seafaring nation to a modern society based on knowledge industry. The project is expected to be completed already in fall of 2012. — bustler.net