Still, Bezjak hasn't refrained entirely from commenting on the architecture. He developed strict formal guidelines for his series, photographing it all with a large-format camera and always with the same lens. "I photographed everything that fit within this frame -- in terms of the buildings' dimensions, but also in terms of the possibilities for distancing oneself from the building -- and not the rest," he says. — Der Spiegel
The photographer Roman Bezjak spent five years traveling around Eastern Europe taking pictures of communist-era buildings. Born in Slovenia but raised in West Germany, he set out to document the everyday qualities of communist buildings. His book recently published book "Sozialistische Moderne... View full entry
Team NJ — as the group of architecture, planning and engineering students from NJIT and Rutgers — has built a futuristic-looking, one-story house, using modular, precast-concrete, construction, as their entry for the 2011 Solar Decathlon.
News Barry Lehrman shared the news that Leonard Parker FAIA, founder of one of Minneapolis's most significant architecture practices and a well-loved professor at the University of Minnesota, has passed away at after a long illness at 88. He also posted an excerpt from an 1986 Star Tribune... View full entry
If it were possible to soar on the wings of angels, or even on those of the lowly pigeons that haunt the five boroughs, we would be able, perhaps, to appreciate the pristine geometric beauty of the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal. Unfortunately, we remain earthbound, and at street level, the afore-mentioned terminal is one ugly monster of a building. But that is about to change with a nearly $200 million renovation. — therealdeal.com
There is a certain quality about the 60s dream of the future that strikes a chord in everyone's heart. The melancholy and beauty of these dreamlike creations have survived not only in architecture, but also in fashion, product design and - most vividly so - in cinema. It is through cinema that the unique feel of this nostalgic breed of buildings could be experienced with the most powerful effect. — huffingtonpost.com
Tom Mallory, of our good friends over at OpenBuildings.com, refuses in an article on Huffpost to say 'goodbye' to retro-futurism and explains why it makes us feel so warm and fuzzy inside. View full entry
Galleries of Life boldly opens a space for more studies of the wide and porous continuum of housing practices in Mumbai, which include chawls, flats, wadis, slums, and coastal villages (see Housing Typologies in Mumbai). If urban housing has subjectivity, then a genealogy of chawls has as much to tell us about social mobility and spatial practices. — Economic&Political Weekly
So asks Shekhar Krishnan, in a recent review of The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life, edited by Neera Adarkar. While the book does practice what Krishnan calls a "“strategic essentialism" it fundamentally, opens up new horizons in the study of urban housing in Mumbai and India. View full entry
Bing's citywide plan calls for dividing Detroit into three categories based on a neighborhood's health — steady, transitional and distressed — and then concentrating certain services in those areas. — The Detroit News
Bing's citywide plan calls for dividing Detroit into three categories based on a neighborhood's health — steady, transitional and distressed — and then concentrating certain services in those areas. For example, building demolitions would be more common in "distressed" and... View full entry
Chairman Gideon Mulyungi said 24 buildings have collapsed in the country since 1996. “Forty-one lives have been lost and 47 people injured over the same period,” Mr Mulyungi said in an interview. — nation.co.ke
Housed in a magnificent Victorian building designed by Robert Matheson and Francis Fowke, the former Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art forms one half of today's National Museum of Scotland. The other half, next door, dates from 1998 and was designed by the architects Benson & Forsyth in a style that is half Scottish castle, half Le Corbusier monastery. Now, after a £46m renovation, the 19th-century museum reopens on Friday, and the two halves have finally been joined together. — guardian.co.uk
He may be a Canadian of Jewish extraction, but The Observer always figured Frank Gehry was part Irish. How else to explain his golden touch? — Observer
ESTO photographer David Sundberg captures an unusual shot off the coast of Manhattan—a Frank Gehry rainbow. See if you can guess what the two pots of gold are. View full entry
How Stanley Kubrick used Escher-styled spacial awareness & set design anomolies to disorientate viewers of his horror classic The Shining. — youtube.com
NEW YORK, July 26, 2011—Parsons The New School for Design has joined with NYC Parks & Recreation through the Design Workshop, its innovative design-build studio led by graduate architecture students, to create a new pool pavilion, Splash House, for the Highbridge Pool and Recreation... View full entry
This year the Blueprint team and a panel of 14 critics travelled to student degree shows across Great Britain and Europe. After viewing hundreds of presentations from a diverse range of disciplines, here we have compiled their findings, bringing you some of this year’s best work from the designers and architects of the future. — blueprintmagazine.co.uk
The exhibition Sitio is an intervention of the artist Santiago Borja designed for the Savoye Villachef-d’œuvre of Le Corbusier - based on the statute of icon out of the time and deterritorialized ofthe Villa. It appears a such floating object in space and time, fighting against the... View full entry
"Team NJ" — as the group of architecture, planning and engineering students from the two universities is called — has built a futuristic-looking, one-story house that challenges traditional building techniques and sets a model for innovative, green housing. — nj.com
Admittedly, commercial real estate signs are not a particularly literary sort of fiction, but this sub-genre does have its own traditions and mores. Its practitioners exercise what we might consider a tentative form of realism: After all, their stories should be plausible enough to, ideally, attract capital. Thus certain rules and strictures — relating to commercial potential, practical materials and the laws of physics — must be observed. — Places
Rob Walker, the man behind the now defunct "Consumed" column for the New York Times Magazine and one of the founders of the Hypothetical Development Organization, reviews the history of architecture fiction over at Places-Design Observer. The piece titled Implausible Futures for Unpopular Places... View full entry