The British architect Chris Wilkinson has designed and delivered one of the four tallest buildings in China, and the ninth tallest in the world. Not bad for a 65-year-old designer who had never done a tower before. The 1,439ft Guangzhou International Finance Centre is more than 400ft taller than Renzo Piano's much-heralded Shard, which is now rising slowly above London Bridge station. — independent.co.uk
Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. — Newsweek
Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools... View full entry
Construction has commenced on the world’s largest indoor arena, designed by Populous, in Manila, Philippines. In a ground breaking ceremony held last week, the arena design was described as a ‘phenomenal structure’. — bustler.net
Gary Bates, one of three founders of Space Group, a 12-year-old architecture and urban planning firm based in Oslo, Norway, was chosen over 13 other firms earlier this month by the Arena, Arts and Entertainment District Task Force's Planning and Design Committee. — kentucky.com
Swiss design firm RAFAA has shared with us their entry to the invited competition for Ivanpah, a 392-megawatt solar thermal power facility currently being built by BrightSource Energy Inc in the Californian Mojave Desert. The project - which counts NRG Solar, Google and BrightSource as equity investors - is currently the largest solar plant under construction in the world. — bustler.net
Samuel has posted a video of a cribs-like tour of the New Norris House, previously documented on his blog. View full entry
Leagues and Legions (aka LGNLGN, a think tank at the intersection of architecture and publishing) and the Institute for Urban Design (IfUD) are asking critics, practitioners, academics, community organizers, and the general public to weigh in on one of four questions dealing with issues of... View full entry
The facade of Harpa is the work of an artist, the Icelandic-Danish Olafur Eliasson, who gets more attention and a higher billing than the hall's architects, the 52-year-old practice Henning Larsen Architects. They wear sober suits; Eliasson's leather waistcoat and silver-framed shades suggest creative leadership. His job is to provide that service that would once have been performed by Corinthian columns and statues of buxom nudes: to endow the house of culture with meaning and importance. — guardian.co.uk
In the past few days, we've received many exciting entries to the South Korean Busan Opera House competition. The entry "Filtration" from graduates of Columbia University received the second prize in the competition's student category. The design team included Paul Tse, Sarah Chung, Steven Tsai, Xander Lu, and Evelyn Ting. — bustler.net
Fallingwater was as handmade as any of the early Modern experimental structures that, while earnestly seeking the hallowed label of prefabrication, were largely handmade, with lumpy (handcrafted!) white stucco that was smooth only if you were two miles away. Like finally seeing a real Mondrian, with all of its beautiful “imperfections,” much of building today still remains “handmade” even when it means the final connections that make a building sing. — Lamprecht archiTEXTural
Author, preservationist and historian Barbara Lamprecht takes on an earlier WSJ article called, "What's So Great About Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater?" Read her response to second question in the article: Is Fallingwater a work of modernism? View full entry
Architecture students cross the Arts Quad and see the new studio space in Milstein Hall for the first time. Milstein Hall, designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, is the first new building for the Cornell University college of Architecture, Art, and Planning in more than 100 years... View full entry
This morning a magnitude 5.8 earthquake shook the East Coast. The quake was felt from Virginia to Boston, even prompting the evacuation of the Pentagon and Capitol Building in Washington, and New York City Hall. Seismologists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have stated that once every 100 years, an earthquake of at least a magnitude of 5.0 rocks NYC. — Inhabitat NYC
Five years ago, local architecture and urban-design firm Farr Associates was asked to solve the problem. The company built a 2,600-square-foot house that is now “very, very close” to generating all of its own power, architect Jonathan Boyer says. The owners and designers continue to tweak the tech, and he’s expecting net-zero energy use in the next year-end report. — Wired Magazine
Wired Magazine in a collaborative partnership with Architectural Digest explores the Windy City’s first, (almost) net-zero-energy home. The home employs a butterfly roof and other smart design ideas to help it unplug from the grid. View full entry
There is one – large – detail. Two-thirds of the original 1,000 council flats will, with the help of public subsidy to the development, now be for private sale. The council says that it's better to have a mixture of tenures than to remake a "ghetto" of council tenants. This follows the current orthodoxy and might be entirely reasonable if the homes were being replaced elsewhere in the city. — Guardian
Rowan Moore reviews Urban Splash's renovation of the 1,000-flat Park Hill estate in Sheffield, the largest listed building in Europe. The renovation of which, has even won the approval of the estate's original architects. However, Mr. Moore finds that the larger cause for concern is not the... View full entry
In its sixth year, the Shaw Contract Group Design Is… Award program honored oustanding projects by architecture and design firms. Through these winning projects, selected from commercial and hospitality spaces from around the globe, design is teaching, inspiring, healing, and uniting. — bustler.net
